What is Content Governance?
Content governance does not answer what gets said (that is strategy) or how it sounds (that is the style guide). It answers who decides, who signs off, what the check runs against, and when a piece comes back onto the table. In a small team it fits on half a page: one named approver per channel, one checklist, one recurring date for maintaining existing content.
With AI in the workflow, the chore becomes the bottleneck. Once a draft costs almost nothing, the work shifts from writing to reviewing, and a process that held informally because only two pieces appeared per week stops holding. The workable shape is a gate: check automatically what can be checked (banned list, structure, sourcing), and have a named person sign off on the rest.
Since 2026 there is a legal side to this. From 2 August 2026, Article 50 of the EU AI Act requires disclosure for AI-generated text published to inform the public on matters of public interest, and grants an exception where the content has undergone human review or editorial control and a natural or legal person holds editorial responsibility. A documented sign-off step is therefore no longer only quality assurance.
Why does Content Governance matter?
The Article 50 exception is tied explicitly to human review and named editorial responsibility. Document your sign-off step properly and you meet it as a by-product; run it only verbally and you may have to argue later that it existed at all.
Content Governance in practice
- 01One line per channel: who writes, who approves, what it is checked against, when it gets revisited.
- 02A publish gate with a fixed threshold: banned list, structure and sourcing run automatically, and anything below the line is reworked rather than shipped.
- 03A maintenance schedule for existing content: every piece carries a date on which someone verifies that figures and links still hold.
