A content audit should change decisions. Counting posts by channel is useful inventory work, but it does not reveal whether an asset is still accurate, owned, licensed, measured, reusable, or safe to republish.
The calculator below converts a simple inventory into an operational risk and opportunity snapshot. Use counts from a defined sample or complete period, and apply the same definitions to every item.
Define the audit population
Choose the accounts, channels, content types, and date range. Decide whether one item means a campaign idea, a channel-specific variant, or a live post. Do not mix levels in the same denominator.
Export stable identifiers, URL, publish date, account, owner, campaign, format, source, rights, approval, result, and next-action fields where available. Deduplicate reposts only when the audit question requires it; repeated live posts may each carry distinct delivery and performance evidence.
Record the timezone and extraction date. Platform edits, deletions, delayed analytics, and unavailable historical fields can change what the inventory represents.
Apply consistent issue definitions
An item is unowned when no accountable person or team can decide whether it stays, changes, or is removed. It lacks evidence when a material claim, statistic, testimonial, or recommendation has no traceable source or freshness date.
Rights or accessibility risk includes missing license or consent records, missing required disclosure, inaccessible visual or video treatment, or unclear customer-content permission. Stale content is no longer accurate or has crossed the team's defined review age.
An item lacks results when the intended metric, definition, window, or captured value is missing. It lacks a next action when no keep, update, repurpose, redistribute, archive, or remove decision exists.
The same item may appear in several issue counts. The calculator treats dimensions independently rather than pretending every problem belongs to one exclusive category.
Prioritize by risk and value
Start with items that combine material harm and continued visibility: unsafe claims, expired offers, wrong prices, broken links, rights uncertainty, privacy issues, or content about a changed product. Pause reuse until the issue is resolved.
Next, identify high-value assets with strong evidence or performance that can be refreshed and adapted. Preserve the stable source idea while rebuilding the opening, format, examples, and destination for the new channel and date.
Low-value, unowned, stale content may be archived or removed according to policy. Do not keep an asset merely because producing it once required effort.
Turn the result into an operating queue
Create separate queues for urgent correction, rights or compliance review, measurement repair, refresh, repurpose, archive, and deletion review. Assign an owner and due date. A content audit without execution ownership becomes another static report.
Keep the reason and evidence for every decision. If a post is retained despite age, state why. If a campaign is repurposed, link new variants to the source. If content is removed, preserve the decision record where policy requires it.
Repeat the audit at a cadence based on risk and volume. High-change product, offer, regulated, or location content may need a shorter freshness window than evergreen education.
Content audit checklist
- Audit population, item definition, channels, and date range fixed
- Stable identity, live URL, owner, source, rights, and result exported
- Unowned, unsupported, rights-risk, stale, unmeasured, and undecided definitions documented
- Urgent harmful or misleading content prioritized first
- High-value reuse candidates separated from simple high-volume content
- Correction, review, refresh, repurpose, archive, and removal queues owned
- Decisions preserve evidence and source relationships
- Next audit date and freshness rules scheduled
The interactive calculator is rendered below. Pair it with the content repurposing map and monthly report template.
