How to audit content for inclusivity

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Identifying biases in content creation

Culture often gets reduced to stereotypes. Entire communities are flattened into single narratives. Economic situations get treated as moral failings. And tokenism thrives everywhere as the single diverse face dropped into otherwise homogeneous visuals, there to check a box.

The good news? Bias in content follows patterns you can learn to spot. Once you name those patterns, you can catch them every time.

This means you’ll be able to see and fix things like:

• Gender stereotypes
• Ableist language
• Age-based assumptions
• Cultural blind spots
• Socioeconomic bias

Start with a self-audit checklist. Ask:

• Who's missing from this piece?
• Who has agency and who's just decoration?
• What assumptions am I making about my audience's lived experience?

Then bring in diverse subject matter expert (SME) reviewers with different perspectives to catch what you can't see from where you're standing.

Why? Because content with unchecked bias sees drops in click-through rates (CTR), time on page, and conversion.

• Brand sentiment takes a hit.
• Loyalty erodes.
• When audiences don't see themselves reflected accurately (or see themselves reduced to stereotypes), they leave. And they tell people about it.

On the other hand, a McKinsey & Company study found that companies with inclusive branding and messaging are 2.5 times more likely to see above-average financial performance.

Bias patterns repeat, which makes them fixable at scale. Build your taxonomy. Train your team to spot the patterns. What felt like endless judgment calls becomes a repeatable audit process you can actually use.

Best practices in auditing content for inclusivity

Inclusivity audits only work if they happen during content creation, not after everything is written.

Build checks into ideation, drafting, review, and publishing. Catch issues early when they're easy to fix, not late when they're expensive.

Here’s how:

Set your audit scope and who owns what

Start by defining what you're auditing and who makes the call when issues surface. Language? Visuals? Narrative framing? All of the above? Then assign decision rights.

Your content lead can't be the bottleneck for every judgment call, so clarify who can approve fixes at each stage.

Document your objectives. Are you reducing bias complaints? Expanding audience reach? Meeting accessibility standards? Clear goals shape what you measure and how you prioritize fixes.

Build scoring rubrics that work

You need consistent criteria for evaluating language, imagery, and narrative balance. That means specific, scorable questions, not “does this feel inclusive?”

• Does the copy use person-first language?
• Do visuals show diverse people in positions of agency?
• Does the narrative avoid harmful stereotypes?

Prioritize issues by user impact and the effort required to fix them.

For instance, a headline with ableist language that reaches 50K people weekly? That’s high impact and low effort. Fix it first. A deep-in-the-site FAQ with outdated terminology that gets 200 views a month? That still needs fixing, but it can wait.

Integrate Siteimprove.ai into your editorial calendar

Drop Siteimprove.ai checkpoints into your editorial calendar and QA gates:

• Before a piece goes live, run it through Policy checks for inclusive terminology.
• Then, use Quality Assurance to flag readability issues that might exclude audiences.
• Also, link Accessibility scans to your publishing checklist, so WCAG conformance becomes automatic, not aspirational.

Turn audit outputs into error prevention

Audit findings should feed your briefs, style guides, and training materials. Caught the same gendered language mistake three times this quarter? Add it to your style guide with a clear before-and-after example. Seeing visual representation issues in product marketing? Update creative briefs with specific casting guidelines.

When audit insights loop back to creation, you stop having to waste time fixing the same problems over and over.

Consolidate your inclusivity tools before they sprawl

Siteimprove.ai gives you one system for accessibility, QA, SEO, and policy checks. No more juggling scattered plugins that don't talk to each other.

Most teams end up with a Frankenstein stack: a CMS validator here, a readability plugin there, Google Search Console for SEO, and three different accessibility checkers that give conflicting results. Then someone has to manually reconcile everything in a spreadsheet.

That's not governance. That's busy work masquerading as process.

Siteimprove.ai consolidates the tools you need. For instance:

• Accessibility checks WCAG conformance and flags issues that affect inclusivity KPIs.
• Policy enforces inclusive terminology at scale by catching banned terms and outdated language before publishing.
• Quality Assurance spots readability problems that might exclude audiences.
• SEO and Performance modules ensure your inclusive content actually reaches people.

Here's how the minimal stack works in practice:

Siteimprove.ai dashboards tie directly to audit scoring, SLAs, and OKRs. For example, you can track how many policy violations get caught per week, measure time-to-fix for accessibility issues, and connect those fixes to engagement lifts.

Everything feeds one source of truth instead of living in disconnected systems.

Compare that to CMS validators, which typically catch only basic website errors, or Google Search Console-based audits, which show you problems after they've already hurt your rankings.

Standards and community resources matter, too, but they work best when they're backed by tools that enforce them consistently. Your style guide can say "use person-first language," but Siteimprove.ai Policy is what stops the term "disabled users" from making it to production.

Turn “be more inclusive” into concrete writing standards

Inclusive language needs specific rules, not good intentions. It requires standards your team can follow without guessing what “inclusive” means this time.

In practice, that means replacing vague direction (“sound more inclusive”) with codified language rules. Person-first terminology, gender-neutral defaults, and culturally respectful phrasing give your writers concrete examples, so they stop Slacking you to ask if a word is okay.

Define person-first, bias-free language

Build a list of approved terms for disability, identity, and experience. For example:

• Use “person with a disability,” not “disabled person.”
• Write “uses a wheelchair” instead of “wheelchair-bound.”
• Try “accessible parking” in place of “handicapped parking.”
• It’s “deaf community,” not “hearing-impaired.”

One centers the person, the other reduces them to their condition. The difference matters.

Document what's approved and what's banned. Then load these into Siteimprove.ai Policy. When someone types a banned term, Policy flags it before the content makes it to review.

Set gender-neutral defaults

Gender-neutral defaults communicate that your product is not restricted to a specific gender. And it’s an easy fix to make:

• Use “they” as a singular pronoun.
• Write “sales team” instead of “salesmen.”
• Replace “chairman” with “chair.”
• Change “each user should check his account settings regularly” to “users should check their account settings regularly.”

Add it to your style guide. Make it explicit.

Build narrative guidelines for dignity and consent

Stories need context and agency, not just presence. Don't feature someone's trauma without their control over how the story is told. Avoid inspiration narratives that strip dignity from lived experience.

For example, change “despite being blind, Marcus excels at his job” to “Marcus, a senior analyst, has been with the company for six years.”

Before you publish, ask: Did this person have full control over how they're represented? If not, rewrite or cut it.

Show concrete before-and-after examples

Abstract rules don't stick. Concrete examples do. A simple comparison helps writers understand the concept. For example:

• Before: “Even older adults can learn to use our platform.”
• After: “Our platform works for users of all experience levels.”
• Before: “Jane, a working mom, juggles her career and family.”
• After: “Jane, a senior product manager, leads our enterprise accounts team.”

Train your team with these examples. Show them what stereotyping looks like and how to fix it.

Enforce with Siteimprove.ai Policy

Load approved and banned terms into Policy, so it catches violations automatically. When a writer types “handicapped,” Policy flags it before the word makes it to review.

That's true governance.

Why showing up isn't the same as being represented

Representation means showing people in roles where they have agency and expertise, not just dropping diverse faces into the frame to hit a quota.

Many campaigns feature diverse people but keep them in the background, in stereotypical roles, or as the lone “diverse person” surrounded by sameness. Audiences spot tokenism immediately. And they're not subtle about calling it out.

Here's how to move past tokenism:

Role diversity means wheelchair users appearing as engineers, not just patients. Older adults leading demos. People of color in technical roles, boring contexts, and unremarkable situations.

Representation works when it's normal enough to be boring.

Brands that got inclusivity right (and the metrics that prove it)

Brands that build inclusivity into their workflows see measurable gains in engagement, trust, and organic reach. Plus, they avoid the reputational hits that come with getting it wrong.

Take the City and County of Denver. A small web team, 6,000+ pages across multiple domains, and 140+ content contributors who all needed to publish without creating accessibility nightmares. Manual auditing wasn't working.

They implemented Siteimprove.ai's Accessibility and Policy tools so publishers could run their own reports and fix issues themselves. No bottlenecks. No waiting on the core team for every broken link or missing alt tag.

Within months, their Digital Certainty Index (DCI) climbed 25%. Accessibility scores jumped 32%. Quality Assurance hit 94% across 3,000 active pages. And the core web team saved at least eight hours per month by getting out of the approval business.

Dashboards helped to track fixes, prioritize by impact, and prove the work mattered. When you can tie inclusivity directly to efficiency gains and cost savings, it's easier to scale wins across channels and keep the budget flowing.

Build audit systems

Inclusivity audits only work when they're repeatable, not one-off projects someone remembers during a rebrand.

Start by naming the bias patterns your team misses. Build language standards specific enough that writers don't have to guess. Drop audit checkpoints into your workflow so problems get caught during creation, not three days before launch when fixes are expensive.

Siteimprove.ai's Accessibility, Policy, and Quality Assurance modules make this automatic. Violations get flagged before publishing. Dashboards show what's working and what's not. Every content creator on your team focuses on creating, not playing cop for digital content quality.

The payoff is increased engagement, organic reach, and conversions. When people see themselves in your content — in roles with agency and language that doesn't flatten their experience — they engage more. They convert better. And they tell their friends.

Ready to move past the annual audit and actually fix this at scale? Request a demo and see how Siteimprove.ai catches bias before it hurts your brand.