Briefs
A brief is a SERP-grounded outline you review and approve before a draft gets generated. The point is to put the strategic decisions (positioning, structure, what to include) in front of you while it's still cheap to change.
How a brief gets generated
- You submit the intake form — target keyword, page archetype, service type, location, length, optional notes
- The engine fetches the live top-10 SERP for your keyword in the selected location
- Each ranking page's headings are extracted and structured
- The per-vertical skill pack runs over the SERP context plus your intake to produce the brief output
- You land on the brief detail page with full output rendered
Generation takes 20–40 seconds. The detail page polls until generation completes; don't refresh while it's running.
What's in a brief
- H1 and title variations
- Meta description options
- Outline — H2/H3 structure with brief notes per section
- FAQ suggestions with question + answer guidance
- Internal link recommendations — anchor + target URL + which section
- Schema recommendations appropriate to the archetype
- Entities to cover — concepts and named entities the page should mention
- People-also-ask questions sourced from the SERP
- Brand voice notes — anchored to your business details and intake notes
- Out-of-scope — what NOT to include in this page
- Target word count — min/max range
Editing a brief
Each section has an Edit button that opens a typed editor in a modal. String, list, outline, FAQ, link-recs, and word-count editors are all section-aware — no raw JSON editing.
You can't edit an approved brief. Reopen it first if you need to change something.
Approve, reopen, regenerate
- Approve — locks the brief and unlocks the Generate Draft button
- Reopen — moves the brief back to Draft so you can edit it again. Existing drafts aren't affected.
- Regenerate — discards the current output and re-runs the brief generation. Use sparingly: it costs another quota point and another API call.
Refresh briefs
A brief can be tied to an existing page (page_id) — these are refresh briefs. Open them from the Refresh queue or from the page detail. The intake is pre-filled with the page's top tracked keyword and a URL-guessed archetype. Refresh briefs are flagged with a "Refresh" badge throughout, and the resulting drafts are counted in the Pages refreshed metric.
Failure handling
If generation fails, the brief lands in a Failed state with the reason logged. Click Regenerate after addressing the issue — most common causes are SERP fetch errors (DataForSEO transient) or skill timeout. Regeneration is free if the brief never made it past Generating.