How to setup Intercom help center on a custom subpath in Vercel
A step-by-step guide for setting up your Intercom Help Center on a custom subpath using Vercel Edge Middleware and working code examples.
·3 min read
Intercom is one of the most popular customer messaging and help center platforms. Their Help Center allows you to publish documentation, articles, and collections that customers can browse and search.
By default, your Intercom Help Center lives on a subdomain like yourcompany.intercom.help or on a custom subdomain you configure (e.g. help.yourcompany.com). However, many teams — especially small bootstrapped ones — prefer to host it on a subpath of their main domain (e.g. yourcompany.com/help) instead.
Why subpath matters for SEO and domain authority
When you use a subdomain (help.tarkle.com), search engines generally treat it as a separate site. Link equity and domain authority are not fully shared with your main domain.
When you use a subpath (tarkle.com/help), everything stays under your primary domain. This gives you:
Stronger domain authority consolidation
Better internal linking signals
Potentially faster indexing and ranking for help-related content
For small teams and bootstrapped companies that want to maximize every signal for SEO, subpath is almost always the better choice.
The problem with Intercom’s official guidance
Intercom does support custom subpaths. However, their documentation heavily focuses on AWS CloudFront and Cloudflare Workers. There is very little clear guidance for teams running on Vercel + Next.js.
We spent significant time trying to get this working cleanly. Most solutions either required running a full proxy in front of Vercel (which Vercel discourages) or gave incomplete instructions. After testing multiple approaches, we landed on a clean solution using Vercel Edge Middleware. Here’s the exact setup we used to make tarkle.com/help work.
Prerequisites
A Vercel + Next.js project
An active Intercom workspace with a published Help Center
Basic familiarity with deploying to Vercel
Step 1: Configure Intercom custom domain
Intercom Help center domain setting
Go to Intercom → Articles → Settings → Configure and style → Domains
Under Custom Help Center domain, enter: yourdomain.com/help
Select HTTPS (manual setup)
Click Save and set live
Note: Make sure at least one article is published so the Help Center is not empty.
Step 2: Create Vercel Edge Middleware
This is the cleanest way to proxy requests from /help to Intercom without using an external proxy.
Create a file called middleware.ts in the root of your project:
If everything is configured correctly, your Intercom Help Center should load under your subpath.
Alternative: Cloudflare Worker
If you already use Cloudflare and prefer it, you can also achieve this with a Worker + route. However, for most Vercel teams, the Edge Middleware approach above is simpler and keeps everything inside Vercel.
Intercom supports subpaths, but the path to get there on Vercel was not well documented. We hope this guide helps other teams avoid the same trial and error.
Need help implementing this on your own Vercel project?
At Tarkle Studio, we help agencies and startups with technical implementations like this — including Intercom integration, custom domains, and clean subpath setups on Vercel.
If you're struggling to get your Intercom Help Center working nicely on your domain, feel free to reach out. We’re happy to help.
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