1 in 3 help-center screenshots is more than two years old
How old are the screenshots in SaaS help centers? We checked 40 help centers of leading SaaS companies in October 2026, dated 6,219 images by their upload timestamps, and hand-labelled 460 of them to count screenshots only.
34%
of product screenshots in 40 SaaS help centers are more than two years old
95% CI 26–44% · Study date October 2026
- Median age of a help-center image
17.7 months
Median age of a help-center image
95% CI 12.9–22.1 months
- Help centers where most screenshots are more than two years old
12 of 40
Help centers where most screenshots are more than two years old
More than half of the help center's screenshots uploaded over two years ago
- of "recently updated" articles still carry a screenshot more than two years old
About 30%
of "recently updated" articles still carry a screenshot more than two years old
29.5%, 95% CI 21–38%, across 1,024 articles updated in the last 12 months
Older companies, older screenshots
We first sampled companies from the 2024 and 2025 Cloud 100 lists plus Golden Kitty winners. That gave only 25 eligible help centers, so we added the earlier Cloud 100 lists to grow the sample. Both extensions were decided from platform counts alone, before any image in the larger sample was dated (results from an earlier 10-help-center pilot were known at the time). The recent group alone comes in at 26%. Companies that have been around longer plausibly have older help-center content, which pulls the all-40 figure up to 34%.
Show as a table
| Cohort | Help centers | Screenshots 2+ years old |
|---|---|---|
| 2024–25 frame (Cloud 100 2024–2025 lists and Golden Kitty winners) | 25 | 26% |
| 2021–23 extension (Cloud 100 2021–2023 lists) | 4 | 38% |
| 2017–20 extension (Cloud 100 2017–2020 lists) | 11 | 50% |
| All help centers | 40 | 34% |
How we did it
Public pages only, no logins. 337 companies screened, 40 help centers measured.
- 01Which help centers
- We started from every company on the Forbes Cloud 100 lists for 2017–2025, plus Product Hunt Golden Kitty winners from 2023–2024 that sell B2B web software: 337 companies after de-duplication. A company qualified if a standard help-center address served a public Zendesk Guide or Help Scout Docs site with at least 20 articles containing images. 42 qualified and 40 had at least 20 dated images. We kept every one of them, with no sub-sampling.
- 02Who was left out
- 162 companies run their help center on another platform (Salesforce, Intercom, custom builds and others), 101 had none at a standard address, 20 had too few articles with images, 7 had no public articles, and 5 pointed at a Zendesk instance that was unmapped or belonged to a different company.
- 03Upload dates as the age signal
- In each help center we took a seeded random sample of 40 articles with images (1,565 articles in total). For each image we used the upload timestamp the help center itself publishes, falling back to the HTTP Last-Modified header. 95.9% of the 6,487 images got a date. We dropped SVGs, images under 15 KB, and images repeated across 3 or more articles, which are mostly logos and icons. Age is measured to 2026-10-02.
- 04460 hand-labelled images
- Not every help-center image is a screenshot. We hand-labelled a stratified random sample of 460 images (308 older than two years, 152 younger), shown in shuffled order without their ages, as a screenshot of the company's own product, a screenshot of other software, or not a screenshot. About 15% of the older images were not screenshots at all.
- 05Counting screenshots only
- For each help center we estimated the screenshot share separately for older and younger images, then re-weighted by that help center's full image counts. Every figure on this page counts screenshots only. Each help center counts equally, and intervals are 95% bootstrap intervals over 4,000 resamples. A few help centers had very few labelled images in one age group, so we re-ran the estimate pulling each help center's screenshot share toward the overall share. The headline stayed between 33% and 34%.
- 06A second rater
- An independent second rater labelled a stratified subsample of 100 images, blinded to the first labels and to image ages. Agreement was κ = 0.92 for "screenshot or not" and κ = 0.88 for "own product or not", with 96% agreement across all three labels. The second rater was an AI model (a different Claude model), not a person, and it worked from thumbnail contact sheets under a rubric the first labeller wrote. Both could make agreement look higher than it is.
What this does not show
Read the numbers with these limits in mind.
- Ages are lower bounds
- Moving to a new help-center platform re-uploads every image with a new date, and a screenshot can be captured long before it is uploaded. Both make images look younger than they are. 6 help centers have no dated image older than two years at all, which is consistent with a recent migration.
- Age, not accuracy
- We measured how long ago each screenshot was uploaded. We did not log in to check whether it still matches the product, so an older screenshot is not proof that it is wrong.
- All 40 are on Zendesk
- Zendesk is the platform that publishes upload dates, so the sample only covers help centers that run on it. Help centers on other platforms may look different.
- One primary labeller
- The screenshot labels come from a single labeller following fixed rules for borderline cases. The second rater was an AI model rather than a person.
- "Last updated" dates are unreliable
- 13 of 40 help centers showed signs of bulk re-saves, where many articles share one update day without the content changing. Leaving those out, the "recently updated" figure is 28.6% instead of 29.5%. That figure also assumes whether one image is a screenshot is unrelated to the other images in the same article.
Cite this study
Free to quote with a link back. Per-company data stays private and no help center is named.
ScreenshotAgent. "How old are the screenshots in SaaS help centers? A study of 40 help centers of leading SaaS companies." October 2026. https://screenshotagent.com/research/help-center-screenshots
Keep your help-center screenshots current
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