Glossary Updates6 new terms added to the glossaries · October 11, 2026, 13:38 CEST
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Glossary · 5 · Content lifecycle and AI

Content retirement

Also known as: Content withdrawal, Content decommissioning, Content sunsetting

In content management, content retirement is the controlled withdrawal of content that no longer applies from use and delivery — including from search, portals and the retrieval indexes of AI functions — while the content is kept archived and traceable for as long as records must be retained.

  • Content lifecycle
  • AI
  • Technical documentation

In one sentence

Content retirement withdraws outdated content from delivery and AI retrieval while keeping it archived and traceable.

Example

When a drive variant is discontinued, its commissioning topics are withdrawn from the service portal and the assistant's index but remain archived with the last released version.

How it applies

  • Status: Retired content gets a lifecycle state such as withdrawn or obsolete, and the decision is recorded in the audit trail with its reason and date.
  • All delivery channels: Retirement covers every place the content is delivered: printed and online documentation, portals, iiRDS packages, search indexes and the indexes or vector databases an AI function retrieves from. Content that is withdrawn from a portal but still sits in a retrieval index can keep reaching readers through generated answers.
  • Products in the field: For machinery and software still in use, documentation for the installed versions often has to stay available even after a newer version is released. Retirement then means marking it as applicable to the earlier versions, not removing it.
  • Retention: Archived versions remain available as evidence of what was delivered and when, for as long as retention rules require.

Content retirement vs. deletion

Deletion removes content entirely. Retirement removes it from use but keeps it, together with its history, so that the company can still show which content was valid at a given time. Deletion is only appropriate once retention periods have ended.

External references