What happens to old articles when the playbook gets a new rule?
Nothing happens to them, unless something brings them back. Our blog playbook got a new rule: every article should carry four to six FAQs. By then 109 articles were already live. When I checked the full site export, 0 of the 109 had FAQ markup.
| What the playbook asked for | What was live |
|---|---|
| Four to six FAQs on every article | 0 of 109 live articles with FAQ markup |
Nobody had ignored the rule. The articles were older than the rule, so the rule never applied to them when they were written.
From six months inside a B2B GTM organization with 36,000 accounts in its CRM.
Why does a new rule only reach new pages?
A new rule changes how the next article gets written. It does not change the articles that are already live, because nothing in the normal week sends anybody back to them. Each new piece gets the new rule, and the old pages keep the old standard.
That gap stays invisible. An article without FAQ markup looks like a finished article, and it only stands out when somebody holds every live page against the new rule at the same time.
0 of 109. The rule was new, the articles were old, and nothing had brought them back onto the plan.
How did the gap come to light?
It came to light in the middle of a build. I was building a check that compares every planned page with the pages already live. The first file it ran on held 33 pages, and that file turned out to be a single import batch. The full site export arrived mid-build and held 172 pages, 109 of them live articles.
| Pages | |
|---|---|
| The first file the check ran on | 33 |
| The full site export | 172, of which 109 live articles |
Only the full export showed the FAQ gap, because only the full export put every live article in one place.
What brings the old pages back?
The check now carries the new rule. Before a new page goes into the plan, it compares the page with an inventory of the live site and returns one of four verdicts: write it new, update the existing page, merge it with a page that already exists, or skip it. A live article with no FAQs counts as an update on that fact alone, so whenever a new page touches it, the old page comes back onto the plan.
A person still decides whether the page gets written, updated, merged or skipped.
What to do when your playbook gets a new rule
- Write the rule so a check could count it. Four to six FAQs, a word count, a number of internal links.
- Hold the whole live site against it once. The full export, never the latest batch.
- Put the old pages that miss it on the plan. Each one as an update, next to the new pages.
- Build the rule into the check that runs before every new page. Then an old page that touches the same topic comes back by itself.
This site meets the same requirement a different way. A field note here carries question-shaped headings with anchors in place of an FAQ block, and the skill that writes them carries that rule. The check that proves it held still runs by hand.
The same gap between what is set up and what actually happens shows up in the follow-up sequence that sent nothing for seven weeks and a scheduled process that failed for six working days. More notes on how the work actually runs are under GTM execution.