Why We Built HelpGuides

We originally created HelpGuides to solve a problem we faced ourselves: making user documentation easily accessible and usable by AI systems, like helpdesk bots and support automation tools.

The Problem

Our documentation was thorough and well-organized—but not AI-ready.

While humans could easily navigate it, large language models (LLMs) struggled. The issue wasn’t the content itself—it was the structure. Traditional HTML-heavy documentation is filled with irrelevant layout code: headers, footers, navigation, CSS, and more. None of that matters to an AI trying to extract useful information.

To support Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and other LLM-powered tools, we needed a clean, structured version of just the content we wanted the AI to understand.

The First Attempt: Crawlers

Our first solution was to build a custom web crawler that would extract our content and convert it to JSON or Markdown.

It worked—kind of.

But it was brittle. Since our original site wasn’t built with semantic HTML, even minor design changes could break the parser. We quickly realized that trying to retrofit clean structure onto an unstructured system was the wrong approach.

The Real Solution: Build the Platform Ourselves

That’s when we decided to build HelpGuides from the ground up—a purpose-built knowledge management system that stores all content in structured JSON.

This approach gave us complete control. We could render content as HTML, Markdown, or raw JSON. It made our knowledge easily consumable by both humans and machines—and easily accessible via API.

HelpGuides wasn’t just a fix for our documentation problem. It was something more.

Our Vision

As AI continues to transform how people access information, websites are changing. The future isn’t about clicking through navigation menus—it's about asking a question and getting a direct, relevant answer.

We're entering a new era: the AI-powered Internet, where content needs to be structured, searchable, and ready for LLMs. Browsing is giving way to conversation.

HelpGuides is built for this future. It’s a modern knowledge platform designed not just for your users—but for the AI systems they’ll increasingly rely on. We've been aggressively adopting many of the newest protocols and specifications published by Microsoft, Open AI, Google and others to ensure your content is discoverable by AI systems.

So if you're looking to make your documentation smarter, more accessible, and future-proof, why not start a free trial and see what HelpGuides can do?