Contentful Platform updates: Enhanced taxonomy and native external references

It’s not a lack of creativity that slows content teams down — it’s the inefficiencies that creep in as systems, stakeholders, and expectations scale. When every campaign depends on manual tagging, brittle integrations, or endless asset wrangling, great ideas get stuck in traffic.

To help teams cut through the complexity and deliver high-impact content faster, Contentful is rolling out two major platform enhancements: enhanced taxonomy and native external references (NER) in GraphQL. These upgrades aren’t just technical improvements. They’re strategic enablers, built to keep pace with the speed of modern marketing.

Let’s dive into how these enhancements are reshaping how teams operate at scale.

Enhanced taxonomy: Organize once, scale everywhere

More content doesn’t equal more value — unless it’s organized in a way that scales. As brands expand across regions, product lines, and channels, the ability to structure and retrieve content quickly becomes mission-critical.

Enhanced taxonomy brings a more intelligent approach to organizing content in Contentful. Taxonomies can now be delivered via the Content Delivery API (CDA), making structured metadata available to any front end, in real time. This turns taxonomy from a backend convenience into a customer-facing asset.

To reduce the burden on editors, the system offers AI-powered tagging suggestions that learn and adapt over time. This accelerates categorization and improves consistency without requiring teams to manually police every entry.

And for organizations managing content at scale, taxonomies can now be imported and exported via CLI. This creates a reliable bridge between Contentful and systems like PoolParty or other semantic databases, bringing taxonomy management into parity with other critical content infrastructure.

Why it matters

This isn’t just about making things easier — it’s about making content operations more resilient. When taxonomy becomes embedded into how content is created, stored, and served, teams can focus less on fixing structure and more on moving forward.

What this means in practice is clearer workflows and faster campaign rollouts. A product marketer launching a regional variant of a campaign no longer needs to hunt through dozens of assets to find what’s relevant. Well-tagged content surfaces instantly, and taxonomy-backed metadata ensures it’s served with the right context across regions and platforms. Localization becomes easier, approvals faster, and duplication less likely.

The result is not just saved time, but increased confidence in the structure behind your content, and in your ability to scale it effectively.

Native external references: Unify your systems with one query

In reality, your content doesn’t live in just one place. Visuals are stored in DAMs. Specs in PIMs. Prices in ERPs. The challenge isn’t where the content lives — it’s how easily it can be retrieved and used.

Native external references (NER) in GraphQL addresses this head-on. Rather than stitching together multiple APIs or building custom middleware, developers can now pull content from third-party systems directly into a single GraphQL query. It’s one request, with no duct tape required to patch it together.

The implications are significant. Product launches, campaign microsites, or ecommerce updates no longer require a developer to build brittle bridges between platforms. Everything comes together at the point of query, in a unified, performant response.

Take the example of a new smartwatch launch. The product specs might sit in a PIM, visuals in a DAM, and pricing data in an ERP. With NER, all that information is surfaced in one clean query — reducing development time and removing blockers for marketing teams that need to move fast.

Why it matters

Native external references are especially powerful for cross-functional teams. A developer building a product page doesn’t need to spend hours wiring together endpoints. A marketer working on the campaign doesn’t have to wait for manual content stitching. The content strategist knows the information is accurate, consistent, and pulled live from the source.

It’s not just the speed that improves. It’s the quality of collaboration. NER reduces the technical barriers between systems and teams, allowing everyone to contribute with greater agility and less overhead.

And from the end-user perspective? Faster page loads, fewer inconsistencies, and a unified brand experience, regardless of how many back-end systems were involved.

Built for the modern marketing stack

Taken together, enhanced taxonomy and native external references reduce friction, increase clarity, and give teams the freedom to build without being bogged down by legacy constraints.

With taxonomy woven into every stage of the content lifecycle, and third-party content accessible with a single query, the operational model for content teams shifts. Instead of patching together systems or babysitting metadata, marketers and developers can focus on what they do best: creating meaningful experiences, launching impactful campaigns, and responding quickly to whatever the market throws at them.

These capabilities allow Contentful to function not just as a headless CMS, but as a digital experience platform that supports the entire ecosystem of tools, teams, and technologies modern marketing requires. Whether you’re integrating with analytics systems, localization platforms, ecommerce engines, or CRM tools, the goal is the same: less friction, more flow.

In practical terms, this means shorter turnaround times for content updates. Easier adaptation of campaigns across regions. Better governance without slowing down creativity. And a tech stack that actually supports iteration, instead of inhibiting it.

Let’s get to work

Smarter structure. Seamless systems. Scalable content workflows.

That’s what enhanced taxonomy and native external references bring to the table. These aren’t just features. They’re investments in how teams work, collaborate, and succeed.

They’re available now, ready to help you move faster, launch sooner, and cut through the operational noise.

Get in touch to see how Contentful’s latest capabilities can transform your operations — and give your team the speed and flexibility they need to win.

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