Xperience by Kentico 13 Version | Update Guide (2026)

Kentico calls its monthly release cycle a Refresh. Each one bumps the version number (31.5.0, 31.6.0, and so on) and ships alongside a community blog post and a changelog entry documenting what moved. Some months bring a headline feature. Other months are mostly plumbing performance fixes, security patches, smaller UX tweaks nobody notices until they're gone.

Worth knowing: SaaS customers get these updates applied automatically. On-premises or hybrid deployments need to pull and apply them manually, which is the main reason it's worth actually reading the Refresh notes instead of skimming the headline.

Here's the rough shape of the year, month by month.

● January 2026 brought AIRA text refinement — highlight any rich text field and get one-click AI editing suggestions or a custom prompt. The Kentico Migration Tool also picked up support for commerce orders and customer data, which matters if you're migrating a store from Kentico Xperience 13.

● February introduced the first proper AI agent on the platform: the Content Strategist. It reviews a page's tone, voice, and style against your brand guidelines, and AIRA's chat interface started accepting image uploads so you can ask it whether something looks on-brand.

● March expanded that further with a Customer Journey Optimization agent and full AI-assisted content writing, not just refinement. Developers got persistent Lucene.NET search indexes for SaaS, which sounds minor until you remember that rebuilding search indexes on a large site used to mean real downtime.

● April added two more AI agents — an SEO & GEO Specialist and a Campaign Manager — plus AI-assisted audience segmentation. The SEO & GEO piece is notable because it's built for both traditional search and the AI-answer-engine world, not just one or the other.

● May focused on content governance: overwrite protection so two editors can't silently clobber each other's changes, plus improvements to how campaigns get measured and compared against each other.

● June pushed content locking further — teams can now lock a page, reusable item, or headless item while editing, with visible indicators for anyone else who tries to touch it. The Management MCP server, which lets AI coding agents actually build and modify Xperience projects, also got a significant expansion.

That's a lot packed into six months, and it tracks with where Kentico has clearly decided to put its resources: AI tooling for both marketers (AIRA) and developers (KentiCopilot), plus steady investment in content collaboration workflows.

A few habits that save real headaches:

● Read the Refresh blog post, not just the changelog. The changelog tells you what changed technically. The blog post explains why, and usually shows a screenshot or short demo of the feature in context.

● Check the roadmap page at roadmap.kentico.com. It's split into Released, In Preview, and Planned, so you can see what's coming before it lands.

● Watch for security advisories. These show up dated in the changelog (for example, the advisories tied to the May and June 2026 releases) and are usually worth applying promptly even if you're holding off on feature updates.

● Test hotfixes in a staging environment first, especially anything touching content sync, CI/CD repository configs, or search indexing — these are the areas that have seen the most structural change this year.

If you're still on Kentico Xperience 13, the Migration Tool has been getting steady attention throughout 2026 commerce data support landed in January, and KentiCopilot now includes AI assistance for planning the content modeling side of a migration. Kentico Xperience 13 is heading toward end of life, so if you haven't started planning a move to Xperience by Kentico, this is the year to start.

It's worth calling out separately because it's the clearest theme running through every 2026 Refresh: Kentico is building AI into both sides of the platform at once. AIRA handles the marketing sidecontent writing, tone consistency, campaign strategy, SEO and GEO recommendations.

KentiCopilot handles the developer side an MCP server and a growing plugin marketplace that let AI coding agents build widgets, configure deployments, and now even scaffold custom marketing automation actions. Neither is optional add-on territory anymore.

f you're planning a project roadmap on this platform, budget time to actually learn what these tools can do rather than treating them as background noise in the release notes.

1. How often does Xperience by Kentico release updates?
Ans:- About once a month. Kentico calls each release a Refresh, and it comes with its own version number and changelog.

2. Do I need to manually install updates?
Ans:- Only if you're on-premises or hybrid. SaaS deployments get Refreshes applied automatically.

3. Where can I see what's coming in future updates?
Ans:- The public roadmap at roadmap.kentico.com, split into Released, In Preview, and Planned tabs.

4. What's the biggest change so far in 2026?
Ans:- Probably the AI tooling five new AIRA agents shipped between February and June, alongside a much larger Management MCP server for AI-driven development.

5. Should I still be worried about Kentico Xperience 13?
Ans:-Yes, if you haven't migrated yet. It's approaching end of life, and the migration tooling keeps improving, which is as good a signal as any that now is the time to move.