Documentation should hold the exact, current truth about how the product behaves, and marketing pages should explain why that behavior matters to a buyer, then link to the document that proves it. Give each product fact one home and one owner, and let the other side summarize and point to it. When the two disagree, a careful buyer stops trusting both.
In many software companies the help center belongs to product and support, the website belongs to marketing, and the two are written on different systems by people who rarely compare notes. A buyer in an evaluation reads both, often in the same afternoon. The feature page says one thing, the setup guide says something narrower, and the buyer brings the gap to the demo as an objection.
This is a content-planning question for software owners and marketing leads, not a technical writing standard or legal advice. Your product, security, and legal teams decide what is safe to publish. For the wider page set, see our guide to content for software and SaaS companies.
Decide which page owns each kind of fact
Most drift starts because nobody decided where a fact lives. Sort the facts buyers ask about into kinds, give each kind a home, and write down what the other side does with it.
| Kind of fact | Home | What the other side does |
|---|---|---|
| Exact behavior: sync timing, field limits, supported versions | Documentation | Marketing states it in plain words and links the doc |
| Who the feature is for and the problem it solves | Marketing page | The doc's overview links back to it |
| Setup steps and prerequisites | Documentation | Marketing says who does the work and roughly how much |
| Which plans include the feature | Pricing page | Docs note the plan in one line and link pricing |
| Retired or changed behavior | Release notes, then docs | Marketing rewrites or removes the old claim |
The two kinds of page do different jobs. A setup guide is not a sales argument, and a feature page is not a specification, so neither should try to replace the other. What they share is the underlying fact, and the fact should read the same way in both places, with the same name for the same object.
Where the two usually drift apart
The common gaps are predictable. The product team renames a feature and the website keeps the old name. The feature page says "real time" while the doc says records refresh on a schedule. The doc lists a limit, such as a cap on custom fields, that the marketing page never mentions. A buyer who finds the limit in the doc after reading the marketing page reads the omission as spin.
A quick audit catches most of it. Take the five pages that matter most to deals in progress and, for each one, ask the product marketer and a support lead together: "If a buyer read this page and then our setup guide, which sentence here would the guide contradict?" Then fix the marketing sentence, or correct the doc if the doc is the one that has fallen behind. Support usually knows which doc pages customers misread, which makes that person the best second reader for any marketing claim about the same feature.
Summarize and link instead of copying
Pasting doc paragraphs into marketing pages feels efficient, but the copies drift the first time one side is edited. Where two versions of the same text do have to exist, such as docs kept for older product versions, Google's documentation describes a rel="canonical" element as one "used in the head section of HTML to indicate that another page is representative of the content on the page," and lists consolidating "signals for similar or duplicate pages" as a reason to set one. The same page says that without a declared canonical, Google will pick which version to show.
Copying also adds little for the reader. Google's self-assessment for people-first content asks, "Does the content provide original information, reporting, research, or analysis?" A marketing page that restates a setup guide offers nothing new. A marketing page that explains when the feature matters, which team uses it, and what changes for them, then links to the guide for the steps, gives the reader something the doc does not. Our working hypothesis is that the same split helps an assistant too: one clear statement of behavior, and one clear statement of fit, each in its own place.
A fictional example: one fact, two pages
Here is a hypothetical case for a fictional expense management app sold to mid-size finance teams. It describes no real company.
The bank feed guide in the help center says card transactions import from supported banks every four hours, and that admins can trigger a manual refresh. The marketing page for the same feature says "real-time spend visibility." A controller evaluating the app reads both and asks sales which one is true.
The rewrite keeps the benefit and attaches the condition: card transactions appear in the app within a few hours of posting, and admins can pull a manual refresh before month-end close. A link sends the reader to the bank feed guide for the schedule and the list of supported banks. Nothing in that rewrite required guesswork. The writer should not have to invent how often the feed runs, since the doc, the support team, and the engineers who built it already agree on the answer, and a sentence drafted from memory is how "real-time" got onto the page in the first place.
Keep them in step after each release
Drift returns with every release unless someone owns the handoff. A simple rule works: when a release changes behavior a buyer would notice, the release owner lists every doc page and every marketing page that mentions that behavior, and each page gets an owner and a date. Our page on publishing product updates so they stay useful covers the release record itself, and the one on writing integration pages that answer real questions shows the same split applied to connectors.
In Hudson South's process, the Authority Asset gathers your help center articles, release notes, and approved product answers so every page starts from the same facts. Hudson Twenty-One records how your company communicates across 21 dimensions, so the marketing copy sounds like the team that writes the docs. Market Intelligence researches which product questions buyers ask before a demo, which tells you which doc facts deserve a marketing page. AEO Creation turns those inputs into answer-first pages that summarize the behavior and link to the doc that carries the detail.
See which product questions your pages leave to the docs
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- How to Specify a Canonical URL with rel="canonical" and Other Methods. Google Search Central. Read 2026-10-16.
- Creating Helpful, Reliable, People-First Content. Google Search Central. Read 2026-10-16.