Exploring External Content Connectors

  • Release version: Zurich
  • Updated May 7, 2026
  • 6 minutes to read
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    Summary of Exploring External Content Connectors

    The External Content Connectors application in ServiceNow's AI Search platform enables indexing and searching of content and metadata from various external repositories such as Atlassian Confluence Cloud, Microsoft SharePoint Online, and many others. This integration expands search capabilities beyond internal content, allowing users to quickly locate relevant information across multiple external systems while respecting original access permissions.

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    Currently, the application supports a wide range of connectors covering popular platforms like Adobe Acrobat Sign, Amazon S3, Google Drive, Microsoft Teams, Slack, Zendesk Guide, and more. Each connector indexes content as a distinct source, which can be included in AI Search profiles for comprehensive search experiences.

    Key Features

    • Content and Permission Crawling: Connector administrators can schedule or trigger on-demand crawls for both content and user permissions, ensuring up-to-date indexing and security alignment.
    • Integration Hub Transactions: Crawling consumes Integration Hub transactions, which can be monitored through the Integration Hub Usage Dashboard to manage subscription usage.
    • Semantic Vector Indexing: All connectors support semantic vector indexing, enhancing AI Search capabilities that utilize the Now LLM Service for improved search relevance.
    • Indexing Limits and Monitoring: Each connector can index up to 1,000,000 content items and manage permissions for up to 500,000 users/groups. Warnings and errors are provided when limits approach or are exceeded, allowing administrators to adjust crawl scopes or request limit increases via ServiceNow Support.
    • Security Model Compliance: The AI Search content security model preserves original access permissions from source systems, ensuring users see only authorized content in search results.
    • Comprehensive Connector Management: Administrators can configure connection settings, define crawl start points, inclusion/exclusion filters, and review crawl metrics and histories for optimization.
    • Now Assist Integration: External content search results can be included in Now Assist Multi-Content Response Genius Results, enhancing answers in AI Search and Virtual Agent chat scenarios.

    Practical Considerations

    • The application is supported exclusively on cloud-hosted ServiceNow AI Platform instances and is not available for on-premise deployments.
    • Domain separation is not supported for External Content Connectors, so data and administrative tasks are not logically partitioned by domain within these connectors.
    • Source system administrators must prepare external systems by enabling necessary configurations to allow indexing of documents and security settings before connector creation.
    • Administrators can estimate document volumes in source systems to appropriately scope crawls and manage indexing loads effectively.

    Key Outcomes

    • Expanded Search Reach: AI Search users gain access to a broader set of information by including multiple external systems in their search scope.
    • Maintained Security: Users only see content they are authorized to access, ensuring compliance with original source system permissions.
    • Efficient Content Management: Administrators have tools to control crawl scope, schedule indexing, and monitor connector performance and resource consumption.
    • Enhanced User Experience: Integration with Now Assist improves the quality and relevance of AI-driven responses by incorporating external content.

    Using External Content Connectors, AI Search applications can search content and metadata from external content repositories such as Atlassian Confluence Cloud and Microsoft SharePoint Online. Expanding search recall to include external content makes it easier and faster for search users to locate the information they need.

    External Content Connectors overview

    The External Content Connectors application adds support for indexing content and metadata from external source systems to make those systems searchable in AI Search applications. Indexing preserves the content's original user access permissions from the source system using AI Search's content security model.

    The current release includes these external content connectors:
    • Adobe Acrobat Sign external content connector
    • Adobe Experience Manager as a Cloud Service external content connector
    • Aha! Roadmaps external content connector
    • Amazon S3 external content connector
    • Asana external content connector
    • Atlassian Confluence Cloud external content connector
    • Atlassian Jira Cloud external content connector
    • Box external content connector
    • Cornerstone external content connector
    • Docusign external content connector
    • Fluid Topics external content connector
    • Dropbox external content connector
    • GitHub Enterprise Cloud external content connector
    • GitLab external content connector
    • Google Drive external content connector
    • HubSpot external content connector
    • Lucidchart external content connector
    • ManageEngine external content connector
    • Microsoft OneDrive external content connector
    • Microsoft SharePoint Online external content connector
    • Microsoft Teams external content connector
    • Microsoft Viva Engage external content connector
    • Miro external content connector
    • monday.com external content connector
    • Notion external content connector
    • SAP DMS external content connector
    • ServiceNow documentation external content connector
    • ServiceNow instance external content connector
    • Slack external content connector
    • Smartsheet external content connector
    • Trello external content connector
    • Webcrawler external content connector
    • WordPress external content connector
    • Workday external content connector
    • Workvivo external content connector
    • Zendesk Guide external content connector
    • Zoom external content connector
    Connector administrators can schedule content and user permission crawls to suit your indexing requirements. If the need arises, connector administrators can also run either type of crawl on demand.
    Important:
    The External Content Connectors application consumes Integration Hub transactions when feeding crawled content to AI Search. You can monitor available and used transactions for your Integration Hub subscription packages in the Integration Hub Usage Dashboard. For details on transaction monitoring, see Transaction reports in Integration Hub Usage Dashboard.

    Each external content connector has its own indexed source for crawled content. You can configure search sources for an external content connector's indexed source and include those search sources in your search profiles, just as you would for any other indexed source. To learn more about indexed sources, see Indexed sources in AI Search.

    All external content connectors support semantic vector indexing of content retrieved from crawled source systems. Only features which use semantic vector search with the Now LLM Service can take advantage of this support. For details on semantic vector indexing and search, see Semantic vector search in AI Search.

    External Content Connectors availability

    The External Content Connectors application is only supported on cloud-hosted ServiceNow AI Platform® instances. It's not supported on on-premise (self-hosted) instances.

    External Content Connectors workflow

    In this infographic, see a sample workflow of how different users in an organization interact with External Content Connectors to enable indexing and search of content and metadata from supported external sources.

    Figure 1. Configuring and using External Content Connectors
    Infographic showing how connector admins, AI Search users, and AI Search high security administrators work with the External Content Connectors to enable search for content from source systems. For details, refer to the following description.
    In this External Content Connectors workflow:
    1. Connector administrators configure connection settings for external content connectors, configure crawl start points and inclusion/exclusion filters to define the scope of connector crawls, and define schedules that specify when crawls run.
    2. The system runs connectors at their scheduled times or when connector administrators start one-time crawls. When crawling, connectors retrieve searchable content and security principals from their source systems and feed them to AI Search for indexing.
    3. Search users are presented with content and metadata from external content source systems when interacting with AI Search applications. AI Search's content security model retains user and group access permissions set in the source system, so users can only view content that they have permission to access.
    4. Connector administrators review and analyze crawl metrics, crawl histories, and user permission data to understand how external data is crawled and indexed, allowing for more effective tuning of crawl settings for their external content connectors.
    Important:

    By default, each external content connector can index up to one million (1,000,000) content items from its source system. When a connector exceeds this limit, it continues to crawl the source system, but only sends content item deletions and updates to AI Search for indexing, ignoring new content items. The connector logs an error message for every 10,000 content items it crawls beyond the indexing limit.

    When a connector's indexed content item count exceeds 800,000, a warning message appears in the connector's UI to indicate that it's approaching the indexing limit. If the connector reaches the indexing limit, an error message appears in its UI.

    External content connectors that support user permissions crawls can handle permissions for up to five hundred thousand (500,000) users and their groups. If a connector retrieves users in excess of this limit, user and group permissions may not be correctly applied to the connector's retrieved content. As a result, the content may not be searchable.

    If one of your connectors reaches the content indexing limit, you can update its crawl settings and file inclusion/exclusion filters to reduce the number of content items it retrieves. Alternatively, if you need a connector to index more than 1,000,000 content items, you can create a Customer Service and Support case at https://support.servicenow.com/now to request a limit increase for the connector.

    External Content Connectors benefits

    Benefit Feature Users
    Configure source systems for external content indexing Configuring source systems for external content indexing Source system administrators
    Create connectors to retrieve searchable content and metadata and user permissions from supported external data source systems Creating external content connectors Connector administrators
    Control the scope of external content connector crawls by specifying source system locations to crawl and content types to feed to AI Search for indexing Configuring crawl settings for external content connectors Connector administrators
    Update searchable content and metadata from source systems on demand or on a scheduled recurring basis Create a content crawl for an external content connector Connector administrators
    Update user and group access permissions from source systems on demand or on a scheduled recurring basis Create a user permission crawl for an external content connector Connector administrators
    Review metrics for source system items retrieved by content crawls Review crawl history for an external content connector Connector administrators
    Review user and group access permissions retrieved by user permission crawls Review user permissions for an external content connector Search high security administrators
    Search content and metadata indexed from external data source systems Searching in AI Search AI Search users

    Interaction with Now Assist Genius Results

    If you have the Now Assist in AI Search and Now Assist in Virtual Agent ServiceNow Store applications installed, external content search results are eligible for inclusion in Now Assist Multi-Content Response Genius Result answers. This includes answers generated for in Now Assist in Virtual Agent chat.

    External content search results are ignored when generating Now Assist Q&A or Now Assist Actions Genius Result answers.