Audiences are a mechanism that SharePoint online administrators and content publishers can use to customize or target content at certain groups of users. Audiences are only supported on classic site collections (not modern SharePoint sites, though it is on the roadmap to be delivered). In addition, audiences are not the same as security groups. Audiences help you direct relevant content to users based on business rules, but any user with permissions to the content can still navigate and discover it.

By default, SharePoint Online has a single audience that includes all users.

To create audiences, follow these steps:

1. Launch the User Profile Service application from the classic SharePoint admin page.
2. Under People, select Manage Audiences.
3. Click New Audience:

4. Enter a name for the audience, a description, and an owner.
5. Select how you want the membership of the audience calculated. The available options are Satisfy all of the rules and Satisfy any of the rules. Once you have selected a method, click OK.

6. Under Operand, select whether you want to build the audience based on Windows properties (such as a security group or management reporting structure) or based on a user profile property:

7. Under Operator, select what comparison operator you will use to evaluate the condition selected in Operand. For example, if you choose the User operand, you can select Reports Under or Member Of; if you select the Property operand, you can select Contains or Not contains for some properties and = or <> for others.
8. Under Value, select an address book entry if you're using the User operand or enter a comparison value if you're using the Property operand. Click OK.

To edit an audience, follow these steps:

1. Launch the User Profile Service application from the classic SharePoint admin page.
2. Under People, select Manage Audiences.
3. Hover over the audience to manage and select either Edit or View Properties to change the configuration of the audience. You can add or modify audience definition rules.
4. Click OK to save the updated audience configuration.

As we mentioned previously, audiences are only valid for classic SharePoint sites. For modern SharePoint sites, Microsoft recommends using the membership of the connected Office 365 group to manage visibility and access to content.