Every content audit starts with the same familiar ingredients: a spreadsheet, a crawl report, and a team trying to decide what hundreds or thousands of pages are actually worth.

Someone reviews traffic data. Someone else argues a page should stay because “leadership likes it.” A few hundred rows in, the process stops being an audit and starts becoming a negotiation.

This is especially true during CMS migrations, when content audits become both unavoidable and difficult to manage at scale. You cannot move content you do not understand, but most audits still rely heavily on internal judgment about what customers want.

That is exactly the perspective content audits are supposed to correct for.

This is where synthetic users can change the conversation.

In our upcoming webinar, Put Your Customer in the Room: Using Synthetic Users for Content Audits, we will explore how synthetic users can help teams make faster, more customer-centered content decisions during migration and beyond.

Why Traditional Content Audits Fall Short

Content audits exist because organizations lose track of their own content over time. Campaign pages remain live long after they are useful. Ownership shifts. Messaging changes. Products evolve. Old content stops reflecting current priorities.

Eventually, teams are left with too much content, too little clarity, and no consistent way to decide what should stay.

Traditional audit inputs still matter. Traffic, bounce rate, metadata quality, SEO performance, last-updated date, and ownership can all provide useful signals. However, they mostly describe what happened. They do not always explain why a page is or is not working.

They may show that a page underperformed. They may not show whether the message is unclear, the journey is broken, the audience need has changed, or the page no longer supports a meaningful business goal.

That gap is where subjectivity creeps back in.

What Synthetic Users Add

A synthetic user is an AI-driven persona designed to evaluate content through the lens of a real audience segment. Done well, it is grounded in research, behavioral data, and defined audience characteristics.

It does not replace customer research. It helps operationalize it.

The value is consistency and scale. A synthetic user does not get tired after reviewing hundreds of pages. It does not favor content because of internal ownership. It applies the same audience lens across every page, journey, and message it evaluates.

That can help teams:

• Evaluate content from outside the building
• Test journeys, not just individual pages
• Identify recurring messaging gaps
• Reduce subjective debates about what to keep or remove
• Prioritize content for rewrite, consolidation, retirement, or validation

For teams preparing for a CMS migration, redesign, rebrand, personalization initiative, or SitecoreAI modernization effort, that outside-in perspective can be especially useful. These moments require more than a content inventory. They require a clearer understanding of whether content still works for the people it is meant to serve.

Why This Matters Beyond Migration

A content audit should not be treated as cleanup work alone. It is an opportunity to strengthen the foundation of the digital experience.

AI-powered experiences need clear, structured, relevant content. Personalization depends on understanding which content matters to which audience. Search and answer experiences depend on content that is authoritative, useful, and easy to interpret.

Carrying outdated, duplicative, or internally focused content into a new platform only rebuilds old problems in a more modern environment.

Synthetic users will not make every content decision for you. However, they can help put the customer’s perspective in the room where those decisions get made.

Once teams start evaluating content from the outside in, it becomes harder to greenlight new content based purely on internal instinct. The standard shifts from “Does this sound right to us?” to “Would this actually work for the people it is meant for?”

That shift can support better migration decisions, stronger digital experiences, and more repeatable optimization after launch.

Learn More in the Webinar

Join Kevin Williams from XCentium and Aswin Mannepalli from Sitecore for Put Your Customer in the Room: Using Synthetic Users for Content Audits on July 14, 2026, at 12 p.m. ET.

The webinar will explore what synthetic users are, how they can be used to evaluate content, journeys, and messaging, and how they can improve content audits during migration to SitecoreAI.

Register to learn how synthetic users can help your team bring the customer perspective into content audits, reduce subjective debates, identify gaps faster, and make smarter migration decisions before changes go live.