Recipe: Docs audit + gap finder

Overview

This recipe walks you through a structured audit of your existing documentation. You will inventory every page, score it against a quality rubric, map it to user journeys, and produce a prioritized gap report. Expect to spend 2–4 hours on a medium-sized docs site.

Prerequisites

• Access to your full docs sitemap or navigation tree
• A spreadsheet or Notion table for the inventory
• 30 minutes with a support engineer to review top tickets

Step 1 — Inventory every page

Crawl your docs navigation and list every page in a spreadsheet. Columns: URL, title, last-updated date, and owner (if known). Do not skip legacy or archived pages — they still show up in search.

Step 2 — Score each page

Rate every page 1–5 on accuracy, completeness, clarity, and freshness. Flag anything below a 3. Add a column for “user intent” — what question does this page answer?

Step 3 — Map user journeys

List your top 5–10 user journeys (onboarding, troubleshooting, upgrading, etc.). For each journey, trace the pages a user would hit. Mark gaps where no page exists or the existing page scored below 3.

Step 4 — Cross-reference support data

Pull the top 20 support tickets from the last quarter. For each ticket, check whether a docs page exists that would have resolved it. If not, that is a high-priority gap.

Step 5 — Prioritize and assign

Sort gaps by impact: how many users hit this journey, how many tickets relate to it, and how critical the workflow is. Assign an owner and a target week for each top-10 gap.

Deliverable

A ranked gap report with: page inventory, scores, journey map, support cross-reference, and a prioritized backlog of 10–20 docs to write or rewrite.