Smart Links allow you to avoid spending too much time on links micromanagement and provide the developers with a live link even before publishing anything. They always lead to the latest published version of the topic available to a given user.
| Portals created after November 20, 2025, use Universal Links logic, which works similarly to Smart Links. However, there are some differences you can learn about here. |
A Smart Link is easily identified by the /smart/ part in it: https://%portal-name%.clickhelp.co/smart/project-id/topic-id.
| If you have multiple Documentation Sites on your portal, Smart Links only redirect within the boundaries of a single site. They will not redirect a user from Site A to Site B. |
Smart Links Use Cases
This is one of the use cases of Smart Links:
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For example |
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You have Project A with two publications: Publication X (Public, updated on March 23rd, 2021) and Publication Y (Restricted, updated on April 4th, 2022). Reader A is an unauthenticated anonymous reader. They visit a Smart Link to one of the topics of Project A. They don't have access to Publication Y, the most recent Publication. So the system displays them a topic from Publication X, which is the latest published version of the topic available to Reader A. Reader B is an authenticated reader with access to all restricted publications. They visit the same Smart Link. They have access to Publication Y, so the system displays the topic from this Publication — this is the latest published version of the topic available to the reader B. The system displayed the latest published version of the topic available to a given user in both cases. |
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When smart links are retrieved manually — you can learn how to do it here — they are particularly helpful in these situations:
- Your project doesn't have any Publications, but you need a link to a topic to give to your developers. In this case, you can provide them with a Smart Link. Then, after you publish the project, the dev team won't need to update the application — Smart Link will point to your newly created Publication.
- Your project has several Publications, but the link should always point to the latest one. You won't have to update links on your website or application — the Smart Link always points to whichever Publication you updated the last.
Automatic Generation of Smart Links
Smart Links are also automatically generated by the system in all situations where there's a chance the readers may see a link to a Project. Since the readers can't access a project, the system will not present them with links to a Project and replace them with Smart Links:
- When you link a topic from another project in the topic content.
- In the Reader Menu items, when you link to a topic in a Project.
- In the Context Help feature. HTML snippets generated by it use Smart Links to reference help topics. Since this is often done before a project is published, Smart Links is a logical choice for such scenarios. By default, such snippets will reference the latest published version of a help topic. However, suppose you do not need this and need to reference a topic from a specific Publication instead. In that case, you should change the topic URL in the HTML snippet generated by ClickHelp before inserting the snippet into your application/site pages.