# Sanity Presentation tool and personalized variants, what do editors actually see?

Asked by Joris Peeters on 2026-03-17. Tags: sanity, visual-editing, preview.

Our editors spend most of their day in the Presentation tool with visual editing
overlays enabled, and they are very attached to that workflow. We are about to
map our hero and CTA components to Croct slots, and I want to set expectations
correctly before anything changes.

Two questions. First, once a component is mapped to a slot, what does an editor
see when they open the page in Presentation? The default document, a variant, or
something broken? Second, when a stakeholder asks to review what a specific
audience will get in an upcoming experiment, what is the workflow for showing
them that exact variant?

## 1 answer

### Accepted answer from stefank (2026-03-17)

On the first question, nothing changes in Presentation. The Sanity
document stays the default content for the slot, so the Presentation tool keeps
showing the editable default document with overlays working as before. Mapping
a component to a slot does not reroute what Studio renders, it only means Croct
can serve a variant to matched visitors on the live site.

For the second question, variant review happens through Croct preview links
rather than through Presentation. In the experience or experiment editor you
generate a preview link for a specific variant, and that link is shareable, so
you can send it straight to the stakeholder. Links stay valid for 24 hours and
can be regenerated when they expire. When they open it, a small widget in the
bottom-right corner shows exactly which experience, experiment, audience,
variant, and locale they are looking at, which kills the "wait, which version
is this" conversation.

Two setup requirements to check before your first review round: the domain you
preview on must be listed in the trusted origins of your Croct application, and
the slot versions in your code must match what the preview expects. Both are
easy to miss and both fail in confusing ways if you skip them.

#### Reply from Joris Peeters (2026-03-18)

That is exactly the split I hoped for. Editors keep Presentation for the
defaults, preview links for variant sign-off. The widget detail will help
our review calls a lot, thank you.