Content briefs

Turn a content recommendation into a concrete instruction — what to write, in what format, and where to publish it.

Content briefs overview

A content recommendation arrives as a detected gap with no brief attached. The brief is generated when you ask for it, because it’s an expensive step: it runs an AI analysis with web search and takes about a minute.

Each brief you generate counts against a monthly allowance. Rewrites for other placements are generated separately and each one costs a unit too.

How to generate a brief

1. Open the content recommendation.
2. Click Generate content brief.
3. Wait. You can leave the page — it keeps generating in the background and is ready when you come back.

If it fails, Retry costs nothing extra: the allowance is charged when generation starts, not per attempt.

How to read a brief

The brief has two halves.

Original content is the anchor piece — the main, canonical version, meant for your own site. It comes with What to write: a complete, self-contained instruction you can hand to a copywriter or an AI assistant with no extra context. Alongside it sit the practical fields — where to publish, type, language and format.

Where to publish rewrites lists the other placements worth adapting it for. A rewrite is not a translation of the original: it’s the piece re-written natively for that platform’s audience.

Each placement explains why it was chosen — for example that the engines cite that domain several times in this theme’s prompts, or that a competitor is cited there and you aren’t.

Good to know Write and publish the anchor first. The rewrites adapt it, and the checklist won’t let you generate a rewrite brief before the anchor’s brief exists.

How to work the publications checklist

The Publications block is the plan: one anchor plus the external placements, with progress shown as published against total.

For each row you can:

• Generate brief — a brief for that specific placement.
• Published? Add the link for tracking — record the URL once it’s live.
• Skip — won’t publish — take it out of the plan. Skipped rows aren’t counted in progress and can be returned later.

Rows carry three roles, and they mean different things: Original is the canonical version, Rewrite is the native adaptation, Cross-link is a link to your original from a page you already have.

How to close the loop

Recording a URL is the step people skip, and it’s the one that makes everything afterwards possible. A recorded page joins your tracked sources, and later scans can tell you whether the engines started citing it.

Watch it in Trackers. Indexing comes first, then search impressions, then citations — in that order, over weeks rather than days.