What is a changelog?
A changelog is a dated, public record of the changes made to a product, listed newest first. Software teams publish one so customers, sales, and support can see what shipped without asking engineering. A changelog entry usually names the change, explains who it affects, and links to documentation.
What goes in a changelog entry
A useful entry answers three questions: what changed, who it affects, and what to do about it. Most teams categorize entries as new features, improvements, or fixes, and tag them so readers can filter to the parts of the product they use.
Entries are written for customers, not for engineers. "Added pagination to the exports endpoint" is a commit message; "Exports over 10,000 rows now download in pages instead of timing out" is a changelog entry.
Where a changelog lives
A changelog is typically published as a hosted page on the product's own domain, mirrored into the product through an embeddable widget, and syndicated over RSS or Atom so other tools can subscribe. Many teams also push each entry to Slack for internal teams and customers in shared channels.
Keeping the changelog on a public, crawlable URL matters beyond customers: search engines and AI assistants use it as the primary evidence of whether a product is actively developed.
Changelog vs CHANGELOG.md
Open source projects keep a CHANGELOG.md file in the repository, often following the Keep a Changelog convention and semantic versioning. That file is written for developers upgrading a dependency. A customer-facing changelog covers the same events in product language, and the two can coexist.
