A studio’s partnership page can go out of date without anyone touching it. A publishing agreement ends, a contact moves to another company, or a game launches in a region the page still calls “upcoming.” The page keeps attracting visitors, but publishers and prospective partners may arrive with the wrong understanding. A regular website audit catches the gap between what the site says and what the business can confirm.
For game studios, publishers and industry event organizers, stale content can send applicants to closed roles, direct attendees to last year’s venue or suggest a territory is available for licensing when it isn’t. A recurring editorial review is more likely to catch those errors than a redesign every few years.
What a content audit actually checks
A content audit checks published pages against their current purpose and an authoritative source. It goes beyond spelling and traffic figures: Is the claim still accurate? Does the page answer the visitor’s likely question? Can the visitor still take the action it offers?
Start with a manageable inventory: page URL, owner, content type, publication date, last substantive review, intended audience and the business fact the page depends on. A launch announcement relies on a release schedule; a jobs page relies on openings approved by the hiring team. Record both a page owner and a fact owner. The person who can edit the copy may not be authorized to confirm a deal term.
Every page reviewed needs a decision: keep, correct, substantially update, consolidate, archive or remove. Marking a page “reviewed” is little use if an inaccurate claim stays live while the team waits for an answer.
Put the highest-risk pages first
You don’t need to reread every post each month. Set priorities by the consequences of an error, how quickly the underlying facts change and whether visitors still reach the page. A quiet partnership page may pose more commercial risk than a popular, clearly dated recap.
- Review frequently: active hiring pages, event registration details, media and pitch contacts, current game availability, platform listings and partnership opportunities.
- Review around milestones: launch plans, publishing announcements, new territories, major patches, funding news and changes to event programs.
- Review periodically: studio profiles, team biographies, evergreen explainers and background reporting with claims that may change.
- Preserve as dated records: interviews and event coverage that accurately describe what was known at publication. Check that headlines and surrounding navigation don’t present them as current offers.
Let the claim set the schedule. Check a live job listing when the hiring team changes its requisitions; revisit an article about a past publishing deal if someone wants to use it in a current pitch. For a small team, a monthly pass over high-risk pages and a broader quarterly review is more workable than promising to inspect the whole site every week.
Separate history from current guidance
Old doesn’t automatically mean stale. A report on a past games job fair is a historical account; replacing its attendance details with this year’s figures would make it less accurate. Keep the publication date and past-tense framing. If readers arrive looking for the next event, add a dated note pointing to current information, if that page exists. A page headed “Meet our team,” on the other hand, makes a present-tense claim and should change when the team does.
Check claims against owners, not assumptions
Check claims with the people or records closest to them. An editor can spot a mismatch but shouldn’t infer the status of a publishing agreement from social posts or quietly rewrite commercial terms. Send uncertain statements to business development, legal, production, recruitment or event operations, as appropriate.
On each page, look for several kinds of drift:
- Dates and status: Are launch windows, application deadlines, event dates and phrases such as “now hiring” still valid?
- Names and relationships: Are company names, staff roles, partners and territories described as currently approved?
- Product facts: Do the listed platforms, editions, languages and availability match what players can access or buy?
- Visitor routes: Do forms reach a monitored inbox, and do buttons lead somewhere live and relevant?
- Context: Could an undated excerpt or search result make an old statement look like a current commitment?
Product and editorial checks carry different risks. A game description promising an unavailable feature can mislead a buyer; an old interview quote may be fine if its date is clear. On player-facing pages, verify any displayed age rating for the relevant territory and platform rather than assuming one classification applies everywhere. A news post needn’t carry a rating just because it mentions a game; include one when the page presents a specific title to players and the classification matters.
Use site data to find pages people still rely on
Analytics can help order the work, but traffic says nothing about whether a claim is true. Look for older pages still drawing search visits, event pages receiving attention after registration closes, and pages where visitors leave because the promised next step may no longer work. Search queries can reveal a mismatch: someone looking for a current application deadline may land on last year’s announcement.
Internal site searches, contact-form messages and repeated questions at networking events offer more clues. If publishers keep asking whether a studio wants partners in a particular territory, check the availability page before commissioning another article. If candidates ask about a role no longer listed, find out whether the vacancy has closed or the hiring page is incomplete. Trace the question to the page that ought to answer it.
Automated tools can flag broken links, missing titles and pages untouched for a long time. They can’t decide whether “seeking a publisher” still matches a studio’s plans. A recent edit proves little, too: someone may have changed a heading while leaving an outdated deal description in place. Keep a separate last verified date for claims requiring a human check.
Make updates proportionate to the problem
A changed contact address may need a one-line correction. A page built around an obsolete release window may need a full rewrite because its entire timeline is wrong. If two articles answer the same current question, consolidate them into one maintained destination. Keep separate reports when they document different events or decisions.
Archive with care. A dated announcement may still help investors or researchers trace a company’s history. Label it clearly and remove outdated calls to action rather than erasing the record. Remove a page if it is truly redundant, contains sensitive information that should no longer be public, or cannot be corrected responsibly. First check where the site references it so visitors don’t hit a dead end.
Material corrections need an editorial trail. If an article stated a fact incorrectly when published, add a dated correction note rather than silently replacing the sentence. If the fact was correct then but changed later, a dated update note usually makes that clear. For a business reader, an expired deal and a misreported deal are not the same thing.
Build the audit into ordinary publishing work
Assign ownership before stale copy becomes everyone’s problem and nobody’s task. Each high-risk page needs a responsible team, a review trigger and a route for unresolved questions. Event operations should tell the site owner when registration closes or a venue changes; recruitment should do the same when a role closes. Editorial can verify the public wording and record when the change went live.
Keep a log of the page, issue, evidence source, decision, approver and next review trigger. A shared sheet is enough if someone maintains it and unresolved entries are visible to the people who can answer them. Mark claims awaiting confirmation clearly, and temporarily soften or remove a public claim if leaving it live could mislead visitors.
Before an annual industry gathering, make one focused pass over speaker biographies, meeting-request forms, venue details and available partnership slots. Afterward, the same owners can close registration, update the next-step contact and label coverage as a record of the completed event. At the next monthly review, give one person a concrete task: open the active partnership page and check its named contact, territory wording and form destination against the team’s approved details.
