DocumentationExperience Cloud KCS

AEM as a Cloud Service: Publish Tier Not Serving Content Due to Assets-Only Provisioning

Last update: July 24, 2026

This article explains how to resolve a scenario where the publish tier in Adobe Experience Manager as a Cloud Service does not serve published content because the environment was provisioned as Assets-only.

Description description

Environment

  • Experience Manager
  • Adobe Experience Manager as a Cloud Service (all versions)

Issue/Symptoms

After publishing content from Author to Publish in a DEV environment, published pages are not accessible on the Publish URL. All requests to published paths return HTTP 404 errors with the WebContentNotFound status. The following symptoms are observed:

  • Author instance successfully publishes content; the Sites console shows status as “Published”.
  • In CRXDE, the page’s jcr:content node has cq:lastReplicationAction = Activate but cq:isDelivered = false.
  • Content Distribution packages are accepted with no errors and the queue size is zero.
  • Requests to the Publish URL (for example, /content/test-site/test.html) return:
HTTP 404 WebContentNotFound
  • The issue persists for all published paths, including .html and .1.json extensions.
  • The dispatcher configuration allows .html and the page uses a standard sling:resourceType.

Cause

The environment was originally provisioned as Assets-only, so no Sites publish tier existed to consume the distribution journal and serve page content. Enabling the Sites solution and running a full-stack pipeline provisions the required publish tier.

Resolution resolution

  1. Verify Environment Provisioning

    • In Cloud Manager, review the program configuration for the affected environment.
    • Confirm whether the environment is provisioned as Assets-only or includes AEM Sites.

  2. Update Program to Include Sites

    • If the environment is Assets-only, enable the Sites solution in Cloud Manager for the program.

  3. Run a Full-Stack Pipeline

    • Trigger a full-stack pipeline deployment in Cloud Manager to apply the updated configuration and provision the missing Sites publish tier.

  4. Validate Publish Tier Functionality

    • After deployment, verify that the publish instances are present and connected to the distribution pipeline.
    • Republish content from Author and confirm that cq:isDelivered is set to true and pages are accessible on the Publish URL without 404 errors.
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