Why Copy-Pasting Docs During Migration Fixes Nothing — And What to Do Instead

Most teams migrating documentation tools default to exporting and importing content page-for-page, but this approach moves files without improving quality. The core problem is that old documentation structure is often part of what teams are trying to fix in the first place. A better approach treats legacy docs as a seed — extracting intent, audience, and key topics — then regenerates documentation directly from the current codebase to reflect actual product behavior. Developer tool Git2Docs has launched a GitBook migration feature built on this principle, using old content to configure generation rather than replicate it. A built-in coverage validator then compares the original content against newly generated docs to identify what carried over and what was lost.