Nobody sets out to publish something untrue. The policy was accurate the day it went live. Then the company added a vendor, a region, an AI feature and a new sign-up flow, and the document stayed exactly where it was.
A document is a snapshot of a moving company
Terms of use, privacy policy, cookie notice and DPA describe processing: what you collect, why, on what basis, with whom you share it, where it goes and for how long you keep it. Every one of those facts changes when the product changes.
We compared publication dates against public release notes across hundreds of companies. The median distance between the product a policy describes and the product that exists was fourteen months.
The four changes that always outdate a policy
Not every deploy matters. Four kinds of change almost always do:
Version it like code, not like a PDF
A trustworthy document has a version, an effective date, a diff against the previous version and a short plain-language summary of what changed. That summary is what you send to users, what an auditor reads first and what a customer pastes into their vendor review.
Publishing without it forces everyone downstream to re-read the whole document to find out whether anything matters to them. Most will not, and their trust erodes quietly.
Make the trigger automatic
The reliable pattern is to connect the document to the registry that already knows about your vendors, purposes and regions. When something in the registry changes, the document is flagged as drifted, a draft is prepared with the affected clauses highlighted, and a human approves it.
Then updating terms is a five-minute review instead of a quarterly project, which is the only reason it will actually happen.
See how far your documents have drifted.
The free assessment reads your published policy and terms, compares them with what your site and vendors actually do, and lists the clauses that no longer match.