Content items can be marked as variants during creation. It is not possible to change the variant flag later on. Variants are used for A/B testing or user segmentation. Content items that are not variants are called baselines. There are several methods that filter output to return only baseline content items. This allows an efficient traversal of the content repository in the presence of variants, especially for complex content item hierarchies.

The Unified API itself does not prescribe how variants are associated to their baselines or how they are chosen when presenting a content to a viewer. This is done by the ContentVariantModel and the ContentVariantService. Basically, variants link to their baselines and define conditions through content properties.