Sites

A published policy that says nothing about who checked it is just a web page. If you publish Confluence content as a website with Capable Sites, approval state can travel with it, so a visitor can see the page was reviewed and signed off without having any access to Confluence at all.

#How it looks on a published site

Put the approval macro on a page and it shows on the published site, in whichever view mode you chose.

A published docs page showing an Approved details card with the approval count, and below it a green Approved on banner — One approval on a published site, shown as a details card and as a banner. Visitors see the status, the date and how many approvals it has.

View mode	Gives you
Banner	A visible approved-on strip at the top of a policy.
Metadata	A quieter line of detail, for pages where the banner would shout.

It is a static snapshot of the approval as it stood when the site was built, not a live control. Nobody can approve anything from your public website, and the event history is never published. See Who can see what.

#Approval state stays fresh

Normally Sites only rebuilds a page when the page itself changes. Approval is the exception: if a page is approved after it was last published, the page is rebuilt anyway so the published version shows the new state.

So a page approved this morning shows as approved on your site after the next deploy, even though nobody edited a word of it.

Capable Sites Overview for a site, with the Deployment card showing Staging, Production, and the Update and Promote buttons — Your site's Overview in Capable Sites. The Deployment card shows when the site was last built, so you can tell whether a fresh approval has reached your readers yet.

What changed	Rebuilt
The page content	YES
The approval, with no edit to the page	YES

#Publishing only what has been approved

Three jobs that sound similar and are not. Pick the one you actually want.

You want	Use
Readers to see that a page is approved	The approval macro on the page, covered here.
A page to go live automatically once approved	Publishing, using publish on approval.
Unapproved pages kept off the site entirely	Sites page exclusions, driven by approval state.

#A few things that catch people out

Dates on the published page show in UTC, because a static page has no reader to ask about time zones.
The state your visitors see is as of the last deploy, not this second.
An expired approval is published as expired. If that is not a message you want on a public page, keep the expiring page off the site. See Expiry and re-approval.
A Capable Sites export is the way to get approval evidence into a document, because the Confluence PDF export shows nothing.

Publishing

Publishing a page the moment it is approved.

The approval macro

The view modes and what each one shows.

Who can see what

What a signed-out reader can see.

Expiry and re-approval

Why an expired page still says so.

Compliance

Getting evidence into an exported document.

Your readers can see it was checked, without seeing who checked it.