Content debt score
Content health checks tell you about individual problems: a stale topic here, a broken reference there. The content debt score rolls those signals into a single 0-10 number so you can see, at a glance, how much accumulated maintenance work a topic (or the whole project) is carrying.
A higher score means more debt. Think of it the way an engineering team thinks about technical debt: not a failure, but a measure of work that has built up and will cost you later if ignored.
Where the score appears
Project dashboard: a Content Debt card shows the project aggregate score with a per-factor breakdown.
Analytics > Content Health tab: the same card, alongside lifecycle recommendations and other health insights. The dashboard card links here.
Scores are read-only signals. Topicary never changes content to lower a score; you decide what to act on.
The four factors
Each topic's score is a weighted blend of four factors, each measured on its own 0-10 scale:
Factor | Dashboard label | What it measures | Weight |
|---|---|---|---|
Staleness | Outdated topics | Days since the topic was last updated | 30% |
Findings | Open quality issues | Count of unresolved quality findings on the topic | 25% |
Verification | Unverified topics | Days since the topic was human-verified, or never verified | 25% |
Gaps | Missing topics | Open content gaps detected for the project | 20% |
A few things worth knowing about how the factors behave:
Staleness climbs as a topic ages. It reaches the mid-point around 90 days and maxes out around 180 days.
Findings rise with the number of open Content health and governance on the topic, maxing out at roughly five or more.
Verification carries a high fixed weight for topics that have never been verified, and climbs with time since the last verification for topics that were. See Track content freshness for how to verify a topic.
Gaps is a project-level factor: the same gap score applies to every topic, because missing content is a property of the project, not of any single page.
The gap factor is shared across all topics in the project. If your project has several open content gaps, every topic's score carries that weight. Closing gaps lowers the score everywhere at once.
The project aggregate
The dashboard card shows a single project-wide score. It is the average of each per-topic factor across all topics, blended with the same weights. This gives you one number to track over time. When it trends up, debt is accumulating faster than you are paying it down.
How the score is recomputed
Scores are recomputed weekly, on Sunday, in the same run that detects content gaps. They are also recomputed on demand whenever a gap-detection scan is triggered for the project.
The numbers reflect your content as of the last run.
How to act on the score
The score is a prioritization tool, not a grade. Use the per-factor breakdown to decide what kind of work will pay down the most debt:
High staleness? Review and update the oldest topics first. Even a small confirmed edit resets the staleness clock. See Track content freshness.
High findings? Open the topic and work through its quality findings in the editor's Findings panel.
High verification? Verify accurate topics, especially published ones that have never been verified. Verification is a deliberate human confirmation that content is correct.
High gaps? Review the Content Gaps tab in Analytics and create the topics your readers are looking for.
Sort or filter by the factor with the highest aggregate score and address that category in a focused pass. Tackling one factor at a time across many topics is more efficient than fixing one topic completely before moving on.
See also
Automated lifecycle recommendations: Nightly scans that turn the same signals into specific, actionable suggestions
Track content freshness: Staleness indicators and human verification, two of the four debt factors
Content health and governance: How automatic health tracking surfaces decay before readers notice