Knowledge Center: Deep Dive on Knowledge Health Score and other additions

[rob_martoncik]

Knowledge Center: Deep Dive on Knowledge Health Score 

Platform Academy | Q2 2026 Release | Knowledge Center 

If you manage knowledge content in ServiceNow, you've probably been in this situation: you know the quality isn't great, but you have no idea where to start. Do you fix the IT knowledge base first? The HR one? Are bad links the main problem, or is it missing metadata? Without actual numbers, it's hard to make the case for prioritizing this work — let alone know if you're making progress. 

Knowledge Health Score, which shipped in Q2 2026, gives you those numbers. It takes the existing Article Optimization scans and turns the findings into a score — at the article level, the knowledge base level, and across your entire instance. This academy walks through how it works, what you'll see in the UI, how to turn it on, and what the team is building next. 

Link to the Academy Recording

The basic idea 

Article Optimization has been scanning your content for a while now — flagging bad links, missing image alt text, duplicate H1 headings, articles that are too short or too long. What it hasn't done is tell you, in aggregate, how your content is actually doing. 

Health Score fills that gap for knowledge managers and knowledge admins. Each Article Optimization scan contributes a weighted value to an article-level score (0–100). Those article scores roll up to a knowledge base score, and knowledge base scores roll up to an overall content score on the Knowledge Center homepage. The whole thing is designed to answer two questions quickly: 

• How healthy is my content right now? 

• Where do I start fixing things? 

How the score is calculated 

There are six Article Optimization scan parameters out of the box. Each one produces a score, which gets multiplied by a fixed weight. Those six weighted values add up to the article's Health Score.  From there it rolls up: all article scores in a knowledge base get averaged to produce the KB score, and all KB scores aggregate to the instance-wide content score on the homepage. 

Homepage 

The overall content score shows up right on the Knowledge Center homepage. It's the first thing you see when you land there — no extra navigation required. 

Enabling Health Score

Two things need to be set up: 

• Article Optimization needs to be active. Health Score is built on top of it — no scans running means no scores. Enable it under Now Assist Admin > Platform > Knowledge. If you haven't done this yet, the Article Optimization Academy recording is the right place to start. 

• Flip the system property. Even with Article Optimization running, Health Score is off by default. Go to Knowledge Management Properties > Knowledge Center Properties and enable Enable article health score calculation for knowledge management. 

Questions from the session 

• Can we change the scan weightings? 
  • Weights are fixed for now, but configurable weightings are next — and that includes custom scans you've added, not just the out-of-box ones. 
• Which articles get scored? 
  • All articles, but only the latest version of each article is included.
• Can we filter by ownership group instead of knowledge base? 
  • Not yet — knowledge base is the only filter right now. Ownership group is on the roadmap. 
• Does this consume extra Now Assist credits? 
  • No. Health Score doesn't add any assist consumption on top of what Article Optimization already uses. 
• Can contributors and authors see their scores? 
  • On the article record itself, yes — the score panel shows up there for anyone working on the article. The knowledge base rollup views are currently limited to knowledge managers and knowledge admins. Contributor access to those views is planned, but ownership group support comes first. 

Additional Q2 Updates 

Article Readability scan (Now Assist required) 

This is a new AI-based Article Optimization scan that checks how readable your articles are using Flesch-Kincaid scoring for general audiences. 

When it finds issues, it surfaces the top three highest-impact changes you could make — sentence structure, vocabulary simplification — with original text and a suggested replacement side by side.

You can accept changes individually or batch-accept all of them. After you save, the scan re-runs, and if there are still issues, it'll come back with more suggestions. It's iterative by design. 

If the default 60-point threshold doesn't fit your audience — say your users are often reading in a second language, or your KB covers highly technical content where jargon is expected — you can create a custom Article Optimization skill and adjust the threshold in the prompt. 

External content integration: Box (Now Assist required) 

If your team stores documentation in Box — Word docs, PDFs, whatever — you can now connect Box as a source for AI article creation in Knowledge Center. Instead of copying and pasting content from Box into a new article, you pick Box as the source in the Now Assist prompt, and it pulls from the relevant files and generates the article from that content. 

Setup involves two steps: 

• On the Box side: configure Box to allow the ServiceNow platform to access specific folders 

• On the ServiceNow side: create an OAuth Application Registry record with your Box connection credentials (under All Menu > OAuth > Application Registry) 

Once that's done, Box shows up in the source dropdown when creating articles with Now Assist. Access control follows the permissions you've set in Box — matched by email address — so users only see what they're supposed to see. 

Box is just the first integration, more to come. 

Release availability 

Health Score is part of the Q2 2026 (June) release, also available on Australia Patch 3 and Zurich Patch 10.