How Fern audits your help center
Fern audits systematically review your help center to find documentation gaps, stale content, and opportunities to improve coverage. Each audit analyzes support tickets, search queries, reader feedback, and product changes to surface actionable recommendations you can assign directly to Fern.
What audits are
An audit is a structured review where Fern scans your help center ecosystem for missing or outdated documentation. Instead of manually hunting for gaps, you trigger an audit and Fern identifies:
Missing coverage - Topics customers ask about in support tickets that lack corresponding articles
Search failures - Queries where users searched your help center but found nothing relevant
Content quality issues - Articles receiving repeated negative feedback from readers
Stale content - Articles that may need updates based on recent product changes
Audit results appear as individual findings you can review, dismiss, or assign to Fern for drafting. Fern does not auto-publish anything—you control which recommendations become new or updated articles.
What Fern analyzes
During an audit, Fern pulls from multiple data sources connected to your workspace:
Support trends
Fern analyzes support conversations from your connected helpdesk (Intercom, Zendesk, Help Scout, or others). She identifies recurring question patterns, clusters related tickets, and flags topics that generate significant support volume but lack documentation.
Search gaps
Fern reviews queries where users searched your help center and found no relevant results. These search misses represent direct evidence of what customers tried to find but could not. Failed conversations where the widget could not answer are also included.
Article feedback
Fern examines reader feedback on existing articles—both ratings and comments. Repeated negative feedback on the same article signals a content quality or completeness problem, even without support ticket corroboration.
Recent product changes
Fern scans your connected codebase (GitHub), release notes, and changelogs to identify shipped features or changes that may need documentation coverage. This helps surface gaps before customers ask about them.
Connect integrations like GitHub and your helpdesk in workspace settings to give Fern access to these sources. Audits work best when multiple data sources are connected.
How to create a manual audit
You can trigger an audit anytime from the Fern page. Use this when you want fresh recommendations outside your scheduled audit cadence.
Open the Fern page
Navigate to the Fern page from your dashboard sidebar. This is the main workspace for viewing Fern threads, including audits and tasks.
Click Create Audit
Click the Create Audit action in the sidebar. This opens the audit creation dialog where you configure the scope.
Review your connections
The dialog shows your connected integrations. If you need additional sources, click Add a connection, or Add another connection if sources are already connected, to connect your helpdesk or codebase. You can skip this if your connections are already set up.
Select a lookback window
Choose how far back Fern should analyze data. Options include Last week, Last 2 weeks, Last month, Last quarter, and Last year, or choose Custom range to pick an explicit window. Custom range provides a month selector for the last 12 full calendar months, plus start and end date inputs. A custom range can cover at most 366 days, its start date can be no more than 2 years ago, and its end date cannot be in the future. A longer window captures more patterns but takes longer to process.
Start the audit
Review your selections on the confirmation screen, and click Start Audit. You will see a toast confirming the audit started. Fern processes the audit in the background and displays the findings when processing is complete.
How audit results appear
After an audit completes, results appear as a dedicated audit thread in your Fern thread list. In the thread list, the audit thread is titled "Audit" with the time window in the title. The audit detail view shows "Audit" with the time window beneath it.
Inside the audit thread, findings are organized into sections based on the type of gap:
Reduce your support volume - Documentation gaps generating significant support tickets
Missing essentials - Critical topics lacking any coverage
Fill your search gaps - Queries where users found nothing
Address negative feedback - Articles with repeated reader complaints
Each finding shows the gap title, the reason Fern flagged it, a proposed plan, and supporting evidence count. Click any finding to expand the full evidence breakdown—specific tickets, search queries, feedback entries, or commit references that triggered the recommendation.
How to review and assign findings
For each audit finding, you decide whether to act, dismiss, or revisit later.
Review the finding details
Open a finding to see the full context: why Fern flagged it, what article she would create or update, and the specific evidence supporting the recommendation. Use this to prioritize which gaps matter most.
Draft with Fern or dismiss
For findings you want to address, click Draft with Fern to assign the drafting task immediately. If you want to adjust the prompt's scope or focus before assignment, choose Edit prompt first instead. Click Dismiss for findings you do not plan to address.
Review the draft
After Fern finishes drafting, the finding status changes to Ready to review. Click Review & edit changes to open the draft. Make edits directly or message Fern in the task thread with feedback. When satisfied, publish the article to your help center.
Findings move through statuses as you act on them: Ready to review after Fern drafts, Published after you publish, Dismissed if skipped, and Needs retry if the drafting task errors.
Automating audits
For ongoing coverage without manual triggers, set up scheduled audits in your workspace settings. Fern will run audits automatically on a weekly, biweekly, or monthly cadence and surface new findings as they emerge.