Content inventory
A content inventory is a complete list of every page on a website, usually with data attached such as traffic, rankings, and last-updated date. It's the document that turns a redesign from a guess into a decision.
In practice
The inventory is just the list. The judgement comes from what you attach to it: how much traffic each page gets, what it ranks for, when it was last touched, and who it's for. A page with no visits in a year and a page bringing in your best-qualified enquiries look identical in a sitemap and completely different in an inventory.
Its main job is to stop a redesign from quietly deleting the things that were working. Teams routinely cut page count in a rebuild because the new design is cleaner, and cleaner often means fewer words on fewer pages. If those pages were ranking, the rankings go with them. Search engines can only rank content that exists, so removing it removes the result.
Every page then gets one of four decisions: keep as is, rewrite, merge into another page, or remove. Merge is the underused one. Three thin overlapping pages on the same capability usually perform better as one substantial page with redirects from the other two, because the signals consolidate instead of competing.
It's also the input to the URL map. You cannot write a redirect plan without first knowing what exists, which is why the inventory comes before the website migration plan rather than alongside it. Do it in the wrong order and the redirect map will cover the pages somebody remembered rather than the pages that exist.
A pattern worth watching for: pages nobody has updated in years that still bring in traffic. Those are usually answering a specific question well, and they're the ones most likely to be cut in a rebuild because internally they feel dated. A services page that hasn't been updated in three years can still be the page a buyer finds first.
Common questions
What is a content inventory?
A complete list of every page on a site, with data such as traffic, rankings and last-updated date attached, used to decide what to keep, rewrite, merge or remove in a redesign.
How is a content inventory different from a content audit?
The inventory is the list of what exists. The audit is the assessment of what each item is worth and what should happen to it. In practice they're done together, but the inventory has to come first.
Why does a content inventory matter before a redesign?
Because it's the only reliable way to avoid deleting pages that were earning traffic. It also produces the list of URLs the redirect map has to cover, so skipping it usually means an incomplete redirect plan.