Enable Human Readable URLs for the Knowledge Article View page

task brazil Updated Sep 10, 2026 1 min read add-human-readable-keywords-knowledge-pages.md
Raw file servicenow.com

Update a human readable URL structure in the Knowledge Article View page to improve search ranking and click-through rates.

Before you begin

Role required: admin, sp_admin

About this task

If you are upgrading from a release earlier than the Brazil release, you must enable the Human Readable URLs feature for the Knowledge Article View page. Beginning with the Brazil release, this feature is enabled by default.

Note: To disable the Human Readable URLs feature, change the glide.service_portal.enable_human_readable_urls system property value to false.

Procedure

  1. Navigate to All > Service Portal > Pages.

  2. On the Pages form, search for the ID kb_article_view and select it.

  3. In the information message on the Page form indicating that you have to change the current application to edit the record, select the word here.

  4. On the Knowledge Article View form, in the Human readable url structure field enter the %short_descr variable.

    Note: You can also create a variable to add information from various data sources. For more information, see Add human readable keywords to page URLs.

  5. Select Update.

Result

The %short_descr variable is added to the URL structure and will enable simpler, non-technical words in the URL.

Knowledge Article View page with human readable keywords in the URL

The following sample URL shows the keywords from the Knowledge article KB0000007. The URL considers en as the preferred language and displays the Knowledge article content in the English language.

Text
https://<instance>.com/kb/en/faq/what-is-a-cookie?id=kb_article_view&sysparm_article=KB0000007

This article URL contains the field variables, and keywords in the following table.

Field Variable Keywords
Category %category faq
Short description %short_descr What is a cookie?

Parent Topic:Using human readable URLs for the Knowledge article page

Search documentation
Search document titles and file paths on the brazil branch