Publishing & Sharing
Publish guides and share them with users via public links.
Guides start as drafts and become available to users once you publish them. You can also share guides publicly via a dedicated link, with optional password protection and expiration.
Publishing a Guide
Every guide has a status: Draft or Published.
- Draft - The guide is only visible to you in the editor. Users cannot access it.
- Published - The guide is live. Users reach it from the Guides tab of the companion's info popup (opened via the Resources pill in chat), or the companion may offer it directly mid-conversation. See Guides for how each of these looks to a user.
To publish a guide, open the guide's settings or use the action menu on the guide card and change the status from Draft to Published. You can revert a published guide back to Draft at any time if you need to make changes or temporarily hide it.
Publishing saves any unsaved edits first, so the live guide always reflects exactly what you see in the editor.
Before you can publish
A guide must be valid before it can go live. If it isn't, publishing is blocked and you'll see a message telling you exactly what to fix. A publishable guide needs:
- At least one step, and the first step must have at least one block.
- No empty steps - every step needs at least one block (add a block, or remove the step).
- An ending - at least one step that has no "next step" and no question, so the guide can finish.
- Valid questions - every Question block needs at least two options.
Publishing a guide makes it visible through the companion, but it does not automatically create a public share link. Public sharing is a separate feature you can enable independently.
Public Sharing
You can share any guide via a public link that works outside of Aura. This is useful for embedding guides in support articles, sending them to customers, or using them as standalone troubleshooting tools.
Enabling Public Sharing
Open the share popover from the guide editor's toolbar and turn on the enable toggle. Aura generates a unique share link, which you can copy from the same popover.
The public share page is available at a route like /share/guides/[token], where the token is unique to that guide's share link.
Password Protection and Expiration
The sharing system supports requiring a password before a visitor can view a shared guide, and setting an expiration date after which the link stops working - the public share page already knows how to prompt for a password and how to show an "expired" state.
As of this writing, the toolbar's share popover only exposes the enable toggle and the copy-link action - there's no field in the UI yet to set a password or an expiration date on a guide's share link, even though the underlying system supports both. If you need either of these for a specific guide, check with your team before assuming visitors will be prompted for a password or that the link expires.
The Public Guide Experience
When a visitor opens a shared guide link, they see the guide runner - the same interactive step-by-step player used to preview guides internally. The visitor can:
- Navigate through each step of the guide
- Answer question blocks and follow the branching path
- Submit tickets via action blocks (if configured)
- View all media blocks (images, videos, documents)
At the end of the guide, the visitor is prompted to leave feedback - a star rating and an optional comment. This feedback is recorded and visible in your Guide Analytics.
The guide runner tracks the visitor's journey through the guide, including the path taken, step transitions, skipped steps, question choices, and timing. All of this data feeds into your analytics.
See Shared Guide Page for what the visitor sees on the page itself, including the password prompt and the expired/not-found states.
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