How to Find Stale Pages in Confluence (Free, Premium and Enterprise)
On Premium and Enterprise, open Space settings → Content manager and use the Last active dropdown — it shows pages not viewed, updated or commented on, with options from 7 days to 6 months back. On Free and Standard that screen does not exist, so use CQL instead: type = page AND lastModified < now("-365d") ORDER BY lastModified ASC. Neither route is complete: Atlassian documents that Last active excludes pages with children, and blogs sit outside the tool entirely.
A Confluence instance does not rot all at once. It accumulates. A project wraps up and its space stays. A team splits and both halves keep the old runbook. Someone copies a page instead of linking to it, and now two versions exist with different numbers in them. Five years later a new hire searches for the onboarding doc, lands on the 2021 version, and trusts it.
The cleanup instinct is right. The problem is that "find stale pages" is one of those tasks where the answer depends entirely on which Confluence plan you happen to be on, and almost nobody knows that until they go looking. Here is what each tier actually gives you, in the order you should try it.
- The native way, and the four documented omissions
- Why Atlassian deliberately skips your most-outdated pages
- The CQL query that works on every plan, including Free
- Why "not edited" and "nobody reads it" are two different lists
- What to do with the list once you have it