Keep docs accurate as your product grows

Documentation goes stale by default. Product changes accumulate, screenshots drift, features get renamed, and old workflows stop working. Without deliberate maintenance, the gap between your docs and your product widens until users notice, usually through support tickets. Keeping docs accurate is mostly a process problem, not a writing problem. Mintlify can take on a lot of the mechanical work, like spotting what changed, drafting updates, and catching broken links. That leaves your team to decide what’s accurate and what ships.

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Give every section an owner

Docs without an owner drift first. When everyone is responsible for a page, nobody notices it’s wrong. Assign an owner to each section of your docs, usually the person or team closest to that part of the product. Owners don’t write every change. They review changes to their section, answer accuracy questions, and notice when the product moves ahead of the docs. Write the ownership down somewhere your team already looks, like a CODEOWNERS file in your docs repository. GitHub then requests a review from the owner automatically when someone changes their pages.

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Ship docs with the product

The foundation of maintainable documentation is treating docs the same way you treat code: version-controlled, reviewed, and deployed through a pipeline. If your Mintlify project is connected to a Git repository, documentation changes go through pull requests, and reviewers can check a preview before anything goes live. The key habit to build: update the docs as part of shipping the feature. When a feature ships, the docs ship with it. When a feature changes, the docs change in the same release. A separate docs-update process that runs after the fact always falls behind.

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Let Mintlify’s agent draft the updates

Even with good habits, product changes can outpace the docs team. Mintlify’s agent can close the gap by drafting updates for you. There are two ways to put it to work. Autopilot is the low-setup option. Once you turn it on and give it access to your code repositories, it watches for merged code changes, opens pull requests with suggested documentation updates, and runs a daily quality check. It decides what to work on, so you don’t write prompts or configure triggers. Automations give you more control. Each automation pairs a prompt with a trigger, like a schedule or a merged pull request. The predefined Update from code changes automation reads merged pull requests in your product repositories and opens a pull request in your docs repository for changes that affect users. By default it runs twice a week, and you can switch it to run on every merged pull request instead. Either way, the workflow looks like this: This doesn’t replace human review. AI-drafted docs need to be checked for accuracy and tone before they ship. But it removes the blank-page problem: instead of starting from scratch after a feature lands, a writer reviews and edits a draft.

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Set up automated checks

Some problems can be caught before anyone reads the page. Mintlify’s CI checks run on every pull request against your deployment branch:

• Broken links catches internal links that lead nowhere, a common side effect of reorganizing navigation or renaming pages.
• Vale checks writing style against rules you define. Enforce consistent terminology, flag passive voice, or catch product names written incorrectly.

Turn them on in your dashboard settings, and set each one to Warning or Blocking. Start with warnings, then switch to blocking once your existing pages pass. Predefined maintenance automations cover problems that CI can’t block on. Fix broken links, Fix SEO issues (such as missing titles and descriptions), Fix grammar & typos, and Enforce your style guide run when content changes and open pull requests with fixes. When pages move, test redirects as part of the change. A navigation update can look correct while old bookmarks and external links still lead to a 404.

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Know when to update, rewrite, or delete

Not all maintenance is equal. Most changes need a targeted update: fix the thing that changed and move on. But some pages accumulate so many caveats and workarounds that they become harder to follow than a fresh rewrite would be. A page is a candidate for rewriting when:

• It has more warnings, notes, and “as of version X” qualifiers than actual content
• The underlying workflow it describes has fundamentally changed
• Users are frequently confused by it even after incremental improvements

A page is a candidate for deletion when:

• It documents a feature or workflow that no longer exists
• The information exists in better form elsewhere
• It’s receiving very low traffic that can’t be explained by it being a niche reference

Wrong documentation is worse than no documentation. A page that describes a workflow that no longer works costs users more time than a missing page would. If you can’t fix it soon, remove it and add a redirect to the closest useful page. You can always bring it back.

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A maintenance rhythm that works

The goal isn’t perfection. It’s documentation readers can trust. A lightweight rhythm helps:

• With every release: Update docs alongside the feature, and review agent-drafted pull requests
• Monthly: Review search, feedback, and assistant analytics for gaps
• Quarterly: Have section owners check their highest-traffic pages for accuracy
• Annually: Assess whether your overall structure still reflects how users actually use your product

That’s the end of this course. You’ve worked through who you’re writing for, how to choose content types and structure pages, how to design and test navigation around user goals, and how to keep it all accurate as your product changes. Ready for more? Create agent-friendly content covers how to make the same docs work for AI tools that read them on your users’ behalf.