Gorgias Rules Explained (2026): Triggers, Conditions & Actions

The WHEN / IF / THEN model

Every Gorgias rule is built from three parts, and the builder literally lays them out in that order. Per Gorgias' Create rules to take automatic actions on tickets documentation, a rule is a trigger (WHEN), an optional set of conditions (IF/AND/OR/ELSE), and one or more actions (THEN).

The trigger is the event that wakes the rule up. The conditions are the tests a ticket has to pass — channel, keywords, order count, tags, customer fields — for the actions to fire. The actions are what Gorgias does when both line up. A rule with no IF condition runs its actions on every ticket that hits the trigger; add an IF and you narrow it to just the tickets you care about. That's the whole grammar. Everything else is vocabulary.

You'll find the builder under Settings → Ticket management → Rules. Rules are available on all Helpdesk plans — they're not a paid add-on — and the Owner, Admins, and Leads can create or edit them.

The six triggers (WHEN)

A rule can only start on one of six events. Choosing the right one is half the battle, because the trigger also decides when in the ticket's life your logic runs:

1. Ticket created — the moment a new ticket lands. This is where most triage lives: auto-tagging, first-touch auto-replies, spam closing.
2. New message in ticket — a customer (or agent) adds a message to an existing ticket. Good for re-opening logic or nudging on follow-ups.
3. Ticket updated — a field, tag, status, or assignee changes. Useful for reacting to something another rule or an agent just did.
4. Ticket assigned to user — fires when a ticket lands on a specific agent, handy for personal auto-notes or workload rules.
5. Ticket snooze delay ends — the snooze timer runs out and the ticket wakes back up.
6. Satisfaction survey responded — a CSAT response comes in, so you can tag detractors or route a bad score to a lead.

Note what's not here: there's no "X hours after creation" trigger. Per the Rules FAQ, rules can't fire purely on the passage of time — they need a real event. That single constraint shapes a lot of what you can and can't do natively.

Conditions (IF / AND / OR / ELSE)

Once a rule triggers, conditions decide which tickets actually get the actions. You build them as IF statements, and you can combine several: AND requires every condition to be true, OR requires at least one. The one gotcha worth memorising is that, per Gorgias' rule builder variables and conditions reference, AND and OR can't live in the same IF statement — for mixed logic like "channel is email AND (body contains refund OR body contains return)" you nest one IF inside another.

Conditions are where Gorgias' Shopify roots show. Beyond the usual channel, tags, and message-body checks, you can branch on things like Shopify customer orders count is greater or equal to 1 — so a rule can treat a repeat buyer differently from a first-timer — or Message from agent is false to make sure an auto-reply only answers real customers, not your own team's notes.

The screenshot above is the real Rule builder. Some Gorgias settings sub-areas render in a narrower ~720px column, which is why the panel looks tighter than a full-width app view — that's normal, not a display bug.

The THEN actions

The action menu is long, and it's the part that makes Rules genuinely powerful. Per the Rule Glossary: Actions, the THEN options include:

• Reply to customer and Send email — post a public reply or fire off an email (the basis of any auto-reply).
• Apply macro — run a saved macro as the response, so your canned answers and your automation share one source of truth.
• Add internal note — leave an agent-only note.
• Add tags, Remove tags, Reset tags — the workhorses of triage and reporting.
• Set status, Set priority, Set subject — change the ticket's state.
• Set ticket field / Set customer field — write to your custom data.
• Assign agent, Assign team, Distribute to teams — routing.
• Snooze for a set duration, Delete ticket, Exclude ticket from Auto-Merge, Exclude ticket from CSAT, plus channel-specific ones like Hide Facebook comment.

A common WISMO recipe: WHEN ticket created, IF body contains "where is my order" AND Shopify orders count ≥ 1, THEN apply macro (an order-status template) AND add tag "wismo" AND set priority: low.

Rule execution order

When several rules could fire on the same ticket, order matters, and Gorgias decides it in two layers. First by trigger: per the Rules FAQ, Ticket Created rules always run before New Message In Ticket rules, and Ticket Updated rules run last. Second, within a single trigger, rules run top to bottom in the order listed on the settings page — and you reorder them by dragging the six-dot handle.

There is no native per-rule "stop processing further rules" toggle the way some help desks offer. Gorgias runs the matching rules in sequence, which means rules can interact: the FAQ notes, for example, that a generic notification rule "won't work if the ticket is also being assigned to a user via another Rule." The practical discipline is to keep your highest-stakes rules (VIP handling, spam closing) near the top of their trigger group, and to watch for two rules quietly stepping on each other's actions.

Rules vs Flows vs Automate

This is where people get tangled, because all three automate — but at different layers.

Rules are deterministic backend logic — reliable, transparent, and free with your plan, but literal. Flows are the button-driven self-service journeys customers click through in the widget. Automate (and its AI Agent) is the AI layer that reads free-text and resolves conversations — powerful, but a paid add-on, and per third-party analysis from eesel it's billed at roughly $0.90 for every conversation it resolves, a per-resolution model. If you want the full picture of the AI side, we cover it in the Gorgias Automate complete guide.

The honest limits — and where an AI layer picks up

Gorgias Rules are excellent at what they're built for: fast, predictable, no-surprises automation on structured signals. If the input is a tag, a status, an order count, or an exact keyword, Rules will handle it flawlessly and for free.

The ceiling is right there in the design. Rules match literally — a customer who writes "haven't got my parcel yet" sails past a rule listening for "where is my order." They can't reason about a message they've never seen a keyword for, and they can't fetch data mid-conversation: a rule can tag a ticket as WISMO, but it can't call Shopify, read that order #1182 shipped yesterday, and write that sentence back to the customer. There's also the ceiling of 70 rules per account (Gorgias warns you at 65), which real teams hit surprisingly fast once every edge case becomes its own rule. And several macro actions — Shopify, Recharge, or webhook-powered macros — can't be attached to rules at all.

This is the seam where an AI agent layer fits, and it's worth understanding the broader category of AI agents for customer service before reaching for one. Macha is one such layer: it runs on top of the Gorgias you already use through a live native connector — it does not replace Gorgias, your Rules, your macros, or your Flows. You connect it once (see the Macha–Gorgias integration), and it reads and writes the same tickets your rules already touch: understanding a message by intent rather than keyword, looking up live order or subscription status through a custom tool that turns a REST API into something the agent can call, and drafting or sending the grounded reply your rules can only gesture at with a macro. One honest contrast worth naming: Macha's credits are consumed per AI action, not per resolution — a genuinely different model from per-resolved-conversation AI billing — and you can see how that works on the pricing page.

The clean division of labour: keep Rules as the deterministic backbone for triage, routing, and tagging — the things they do perfectly — and layer an agent on top for the reasoning-and-lookup work a literal if/then engine was never meant to do.

FAQ

Where do I find Rules in Gorgias? Go to Settings → Ticket management → Rules. Rules are available on all Helpdesk plans, and the Owner, Admins, and Leads can create or edit them.

What triggers can start a Gorgias rule? Six events: Ticket created, New message in ticket, Ticket updated, Ticket assigned to user, Ticket snooze delay ends, and Satisfaction survey responded. There's no time-based trigger — a rule always needs a real event to fire.

In what order do rules run? Ticket Created rules run first, then New Message In Ticket rules, and Ticket Updated rules run last. Within a single trigger, rules run top to bottom in the order shown on the settings page, which you can drag to reorder.

How many rules can I create? Up to 70 per account. Gorgias shows a warning once you've created 65 or more, so plan for consolidation before you hit the ceiling.

What's the difference between Rules and Automate? Rules are deterministic backend if/then logic included on every Helpdesk plan; they match keywords and fields literally. Automate (with its AI Agent) is a paid add-on that reads natural language and resolves conversations, typically billed per resolved conversation. They complement each other rather than compete.

Want your Gorgias tickets answered, not just tagged? Start a free trial of Macha and connect it to your Gorgias in minutes.