An engineer specifying a valve, a consultant checking a cable tray against a project specification, a contractor’s buyer comparing two suppliers: each of them does the research before anyone calls your sales team. They want the specification sheet, the certificate the consultant asked for, the CAD or BIM object for their model, and the nearest distributor with stock. In the Gulf and Egypt they look in Arabic and English, often across several of your brands and country sites.
On many manufacturer websites that content is a copy. Product data lives in the ERP or a PIM, files sit on a shared drive, and the site holds versions that go out of date. Download forms email a marketing inbox, and the lead never reaches sales. SitecoreAI, launched in November 2025 as the evolution of XM Cloud, handles this well when each kind of content has one home. This guide sets out those homes, how downloads become CRM leads, search and locators, and Arabic.
One home for each kind of content
Most problems on manufacturer sites come from one record living in two places. Decide the system of record first, then the route to the site.
| Content | System of record | How it reaches the site |
|---|---|---|
| Products, variants and attributes | PIM, or the ERP where there is no PIM | Imported as SitecoreAI items through the Authoring and Management API, or read from the PIM by the front end |
| Specification sheets and certificates | Content Hub DAM | Linked from product items through Sitecore Connect for Content Hub |
| CAD and BIM files | Content Hub DAM | Linked from the DAM and kept out of Experience Edge media |
| Applications, project stories and guides | SitecoreAI | Authored and published in Pages |
| Distributors and dealers | CRM or ERP | Pushed to a search source with country, city, brand and product filters |
| Leads from downloads and enquiries | CRM | Form submissions sent by webhook |
For product data there are two sound patterns. The Authoring and Management GraphQL API gives read and write access to tasks that once needed the SitecoreAI interface, so a scheduled job can create and update product items from the PIM, and editors add stories, images and personalization around them. The alternative is a front end that reads the PIM at build or request time, which keeps one copy of the data and leaves editors unable to change it. A mix often works: imported items for the products you promote, a live feed for the long tail.
Specification sheets, certificates, CAD and BIM
Files belong in the DAM. Sitecore’s recap of its November 2025 Symposium says SitecoreAI customers receive baseline entitlements for CDP, Personalize, Search and DAM, and Sitecore Connect for Content Hub, which has a DAM module, is included in the SitecoreAI base image and needs to be enabled. Size is the practical reason: Experience Edge caps a media item at 50 MB, and a full catalogue, a BIM family library or a CAD assembly can pass that. Sitecore also notes that bandwidth and storage limits may apply depending on your contract, which matters for heavy downloads.
Treat each certificate as an asset with its own metadata: the standard, the issuing body, the products and markets it covers, and its expiry date. Link it to products from the DAM, so a renewed certificate replaces the old one on every product page at once. Consultants check dates, and an expired certificate on a product page costs more trust than a missing one.
Turning downloads into CRM leads
A gated download is a lead form with a file behind it. Forms in SitecoreAI send data to other applications without capturing it, and each form posts to a webhook that authenticates with OAuth 2, basic authentication or an API credential, on a public HTTPS endpoint. Sitecore’s documentation mentions products such as Sitecore Connect or Zapier for building the workflow. For a manufacturer that runs Salesforce or another CRM, an integration layer is the better receiver: it checks for duplicates, routes the lead by country, brand and product line, and holds submissions while the CRM is unavailable. Because SitecoreAI keeps no copy, that last point matters.
- Gate what signals intent. Keep datasheets and certificates open, because consultants need them without friction and search engines and AI assistants can read them, which is where our AI visibility work starts. Gate CAD and BIM files, which people download when a product is going into a design.
- Ask for the role. Consultant, contractor, distributor or owner, plus the project name and country, so sales knows who is calling and why.
- Pass the context. Send the product, the file and the page with each submission, and capture consent in the same form.
Search and distributor locators
Engineers search by attribute: size, rating, material, standard. Search is part of SitecoreAI, and Sitecore’s search documentation describes three kinds of source: a site source that crawls the website, a content source that ingests items from the Content editor, and a push source that receives documents from an external system through an ingestion API. Fields can be made filterable or sortable. Sitecore notes that feature availability is part of a phased rollout, so confirm what your subscription includes.
A push source suits product finders and locators. Push product records from the PIM with the attributes engineers filter on. Push the distributor list from the CRM or ERP with country, city, brand and product line as filters, and draw the map in the front end. The locator then matches the distributor agreements in your CRM, and a newly appointed dealer can appear on the site the same day.
Arabic, brands and countries
Model specifications once. In SitecoreAI a shared field has the same value in every language and version, and an unversioned field has one value per language. Put model codes, dimensions, ratings and standards in shared fields, so Arabic and English pages cannot disagree on a number, and keep descriptions and installation notes in language versions.
AI translation creates language versions of a page and its data sources, translating text, rich text, links and image alt text, and the new versions start in the initial workflow state, usually Draft, for review. Sitecore’s page does not list the languages it supports, so test Arabic output on your own technical vocabulary and keep a reviewer who knows the products. Right-to-left layout comes from your front end, so build Arabic into the design system from the first component.
Several brands and countries fit in one environment: Experience Edge allows up to 1,000 sites per environment. A site per brand, in Arabic and English, suits a range that is the same everywhere. A site per brand and country suits ranges and distributors that differ by market.
Where to start
- Audit what engineers download. List the files on the current site, where each master copy lives, and which are out of date.
- Name the system of record for products, files, distributors and leads, and agree it with product management, marketing and sales.
- Fix one product family end to end: PIM data, DAM files, shared specification fields, Arabic pages, a gated CAD download and a lead in the CRM.
- Then scale to the other families, brands and countries on the same model.
On Sitecore XP today? Arcsen Ascend is our migration route to SitecoreAI, and our comparison of SitecoreAI and XM Cloud explains what changed.
Frequently asked questions
Can SitecoreAI hold our product catalogue, or do we need a PIM?
SitecoreAI can hold product pages as items, and its Authoring and Management GraphQL API can create and update them from another system. For a large range with many attributes, keep a PIM or the ERP as the master and feed the site from it.
Where should CAD and BIM files live?
In the DAM. Experience Edge caps a media item at 50 MB, which large CAD and BIM files can exceed, so link them from Content Hub DAM through Sitecore Connect for Content Hub.
How do gated downloads reach Salesforce or another CRM?
SitecoreAI Forms send each submission to a webhook secured with OAuth 2, basic authentication or an API credential. Forms keep no copy of the data, so the receiving endpoint should queue and retry.
Does SitecoreAI support Arabic?
You can create Arabic language versions of each page, and AI translation creates drafts that go through workflow. Sitecore’s translation page does not list supported languages, and right-to-left layout is built in your front end, so test both early.
Sources
- Sitecore press release: Sitecore unveils SitecoreAI (4 November 2025)
- Sitecore: AI meets human connection at Sitecore Symposium 2025 (November 2025)
- Sitecore documentation: Limitations and restrictions of Experience Edge
- Sitecore documentation: Sitecore Connect for Content Hub
- Sitecore documentation: The Authoring and Management GraphQL API
- Sitecore documentation: The template field template
- Sitecore documentation: Translate a page with AI
- Sitecore documentation: Search experiences
- Sitecore documentation: Forms in SitecoreAI
- Sitecore documentation: Work with webhooks in Forms
