Creating the documentation is half the battle; keeping it accurate and maintained is equally important for Answer Engine Optimization. Outdated or poorly managed content can lead an AI (or a user) to wrong or confusing answers.
Keep Information Up-to-Date
Regularly review and update documentation to reflect the current state of your products, policies, and procedures.
An AI cannot know that a page is outdated unless it’s removed or marked, so it might present obsolete info if you leave it in place. Atlassian notes that incorrect or outdated source information is a top reason for AI answers to be wrong, and advises ensuring everything is accurate and current https://support.atlassian.com/jira-service-management-cloud/docs/set-up-your-knowledge-base-to-improve-the-quality-of-ai-answers/.
Review cycles (i.e., every 6 or 12 months, depending on how fast things change) are recommended to implement. These cycles could be triggered by upgrades, new releases or any other substancial change, such as future deprecation.
Up-to-date content boasts trust: both users and AI will be relying on this info being correct at the time of answer.
Avoid Duplicate or Redundant Content
Maintain a single source of truth for each subject.
If the same content (like setup steps or a definition) is duplicated across multiple pages, it’s easy for one copy to become outdated while another is updated, creating inconsistency.
This can mislead the AI into citing the wrong version. Aim to have one definitive page per topic or procedure. If you find you need to cover the same information in multiple contexts (e.g., a procedure used in two different tutorials), consider including links to existing content or using Confluence’s Include Page or Excerpt macros to reuse content instead of rewriting it.
This way, updates in one place propagate everywhere. At the very least, if duplication is unavoidable, diligently update all instances when the info changes (prioritize consolidation).
By minimizing duplicates, you reduce the risk of an AI pulling from an outdated page when a newer one exists.
Use Archiving and Versioning Practices
Ensure outdated content doesn’t overcrowd the knowledge base.
If you have pages that are superseded by new ones (for example, documentation for an older version of a product), label them clearly as such or move them to an archive space.
Products like Confluence Cloud offers an “Archive” feature, archived pages won’t show in normal searches, which is actually beneficial for AEO because the AI will focus on current pages.
Also, you can create an Archive space or section as suggested in documentation best practices. When archiving, add a “status” to the page “Archived” or even add a note like “Archived: This content is for legacy system X and is no longer current as of 2025” at the top of the page. This ensures that even if an AI stumbles on it, it will see that it’s obsolete.
For living documents that undergo frequent changes (like an evolving policy), consider a change log or revision date on the page so it’s clear how current it is.
Quality Control and Feedback
Encourage users and team members to give feedback on documentation.
Nurture a feedback loop with users with tools like Confluence comments or an integrated feedback mechanism can alert you to unclear or missing information.
One of the best approach to this is paying attention to the questions that users ask in support tickets or chats, if the AI or knowledge base didn’t answer them effectively, that’s a sign your documentation might need improvement in that area.
Perhaps users are asking a question that wasn’t directly addressed, which happens more often than you imagine; you might then add an FAQ entry or make that answer more prominent in the docs.
Essentially, use real-world Q&A data to refine the documentation. Additionally, if your AI agent provides a way to see what queries it failed on or where it had low confidence, use that insight to identify content gaps.
Improving documentation is a continuous process, and aligning it with actual user queries is the heart of Answer Engine Optimization: you are optimizing answers, not just pages.