Pick a page you published in March 2023. Someone wrote it. Someone approved it. Both can probably still be named. Now the question that matters: who owns it now? Not who created it, not who signed it off, but whose job it is, today, to decide whether it is still true. In most organisations that question meets silence, and the silence is not a weak team. It is an org chart that was never drawn to answer it.
Publishing has an owner. Maintenance has none. A page enters the world with an author and a sign-off, then crosses into a custodial limbo where responsibility quietly evaporates. The author moved teams. The approver got promoted. The campaign ended. The page stayed, live and indexed, and once an AI system can reach it, retrieved and spoken in the company’s voice with total confidence.
Orphans are dangerous for the three things that make them invisible. They are old, so they have collected the most links and authority. They are unowned, so nobody is watching them to catch the drift. And they are unlinked, so nobody browsing the site will ever stumble across them and notice they are wrong. Their only reliable visitor is a crawler: yours, and the ones building the models your customers now ask.
The correction is structural: ownership has to be a field, not a meeting. Every record carries a name, so “who fixes this” is answerable in one lookup rather than one workshop. When a page can name its owner, decay has somewhere to go: a person who gets the alert, decides, refreshes or retires it. When it cannot, the page keeps talking, and the company is represented by whoever happened to write something true in 2023.
Here is where woods stops. It can tell you which pages nothing links to, how deep the ones that are linked sit, and which the menu never reaches. It cannot yet tell you who owns them: that answer lives in a system it does not read, and the report says so rather than guess. A lens with no coverage is refused, not reported.
A page nobody owns is a page that speaks for you without permission.
Go and ask the question about one real page. The answer tells you how governed your estate actually is.