Audit Trail – Definition

A chronological, tamper-evident record of who changed, approved, or published what content, and when.

An audit trail is what makes content approval demonstrably compliant rather than merely trusted — in a dispute or regulatory audit, it lets a team reconstruct exactly which content was live at any point and who approved it. A trustworthy audit trail needs to be genuinely tamper-evident, not just a log table that a sufficiently privileged user could theoretically edit — append-only storage, cryptographic signing, or write access restricted even from system administrators are the kinds of technical safeguards that make an audit trail credible as evidence rather than just internal documentation that happens to exist.