Article health score
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Summary of Article health score
The Article Health Score feature helps ServiceNow customers track and improve the quality of their knowledge articles. It provides specific scan results that highlight issues to fix within an article. Improvements to individual articles contribute to higher scores for the entire Knowledge Base and overall instance, enhancing content reliability and user experience.
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Improving the Article Health Score
When an article scores low, customers can take a structured approach to improve it:
- Review findings: Use the article health score panel in the article’s edit view to see individual scan parameters and their scores. Focus first on parameters with the lowest scores.
- Fix recommendations: The article optimization window lists actionable recommendations such as adding missing alt text to images, removing duplicate H1 headings, or fixing broken links. Implement these changes directly in the article.
- Check updated score: After saving edits, refresh the Health Score tab to see the recalculated score reflecting improvements.
Scan Parameters
Six key parameters are evaluated for every article to calculate the health score:
- Image alt tags: Checks for alternative text on images, which is important for accessibility and search indexing.
- Multiple H1 tags: Detects if there is more than one H1 heading, which can confuse search engines and harm content structure.
- Bad links: Identifies broken or unresolvable links that degrade user trust and experience.
- Article length: Measures if the article length is appropriate to cover the topic adequately without being too short or too long.
- Title relevancy: Assesses how well the article content aligns with its title to ensure user expectations are met.
- Article readability: Evaluates ease of reading based on sentence complexity and vocabulary, promoting content understandable to a broad audience.
How the Article Health Score Is Calculated
The overall score is a weighted sum of the six parameter scores, where each parameter’s score is multiplied by a fixed weight reflecting its impact:
- Each parameter contributes roughly 16-17% to the total score.
- For example, if 6 out of 10 links are valid, the Bad Links score is 60, which multiplied by its 0.17 weight contributes 10.2 points to the overall score.
- The sum of all weighted contributions yields the final article health score, typically rounded to the nearest whole number.
Currently, these weights are fixed but will be configurable in a future release.
Practical Benefits for ServiceNow Customers
By leveraging the Article Health Score, customers can systematically identify and resolve quality issues in their knowledge articles. This process improves article accessibility, structure, reliability, and usability, leading to better search relevance and user satisfaction. Regularly monitoring and addressing low-scoring parameters helps maintain a high-quality Knowledge Base that supports efficient service delivery.
Track and improve the quality of your knowledge articles using the article health score. Scan results highlight specific issues to fix, and improvements automatically roll up to your Knowledge Base and instance scores.
Improving the article health score
When an article has a low health score, the scan parameters identify specific findings you can act on. The improvement process follows three steps:
- Review the findings. Open the article health score panel from the article's edit view. The panel lists each scan parameter, its individual score, and its contribution to the overall article score. Parameters with low scores have findings that need attention.
- Fix the recommendations. In the article optimization window you can see the articles and their scores, further you can edit the article to fix the recommendation. Each finding includes a recommendation, for example, adding missing alt text to an image, removing a duplicate H1 heading, or updating a broken link. Apply the recommended changes and save the article.
- Check the updated score. After saving, switch to the Health score tab in the right-side panel to see the recalculated score. The score updates to reflect the improvements made. For more information, see View the Knowledge Health Score dashboard
Repeat this process for the parameters with the lowest scores first as these have the highest impact on the overall article score and, by extension, the knowledge base and instance scores.
Scan parameters
The following parameters are evaluated for every article:
- Image alt tags
- Checks whether images in the article have alternative text. Missing alt text reduces accessibility and affects search indexing.
- Multiple H1 tags
- Detects articles that contain more than one H1 heading. Multiple H1 tags can confuse search engines and indicate poor content structure.
- Bad links
- Identifies broken or unresolvable links within the article. Bad links degrade the reader experience and reduce article trust.
- Article length
- Evaluates whether the article meets the minimum length threshold for adequate content coverage. Articles that are too short may not resolve the reader's issue. Similarly, if articles are too long it might not get retrieved well by AI systems.
- Title relevancy
- Measures how closely the article body aligns with its title. Low relevancy scores indicate a mismatch between what the title promises and what the article delivers.
- Article readability
- Assesses the reading ease of the article based on sentence complexity and vocabulary. Higher readability scores indicate content that is easier to understand for a broader audience.
How the Knowledge Health Score is calculated
Each article is evaluated against six scan parameters. Every parameter carries a weight that represents its proportional contribution to the overall article score. The article health score is the sum of each parameter's score multiplied by its weight.
To show how a single parameter score feeds into the total, consider the Bad links scan.
For example, an article contains 10 links. The scan detects 4 broken links, leaving 6 good links. The Bad links score is round (6 / 10 × 100) = 60. This score of 60 is then multiplied by the Bad links weight of 0.17, contributing 10.2 to the overall article health score. This 10.2 is one of six such contributions, one from each scan parameter as in the following table. When all six are added together (13.6 + 11.2 + 10.2 + 13.6 + 15.3 + 12.8), the total is 76.7, which rounds to an article health score of 77.
| Scan parameter | Weight | Parameter score | Contribution to article score |
|---|---|---|---|
| Image alt tags | 0.17 (17%) | 80 | 13.6 |
| Multiple H1 tags | 0.16 (16%) | 70 | 11.2 |
| Bad links | 0.17 (17%) | 60 | 10.2 |
| Article length | 0.17 (17%) | 80 | 13.6 |
| Title relevancy | 0.17 (17%) | 90 | 15.3 |
| Article readability | 0.16 (16%) | 80 | 12.8 |
| Total | 1.00 (100%) | — | 76.7 ≈ 77 |