Articles that sound like you, published for you

An AI SEO content writer is only useful if what it produces is worth publishing. That depends less on the model and more on what happens around it: which topics it picks, what research goes into the outline, whether the article sounds like the business, and who checks it before it goes live. This article follows one article through RankThat from start to finish, so you can see each step, what you control at each stage, and where a person still has to add what only the business knows.

The pipeline at a glance

Stage 1: teach it how the business sounds

Open Content › Brand Voice, crawl the sitemap and click Analyze Brand Voice. RankThat reads five of the site’s longer pages (500 words or more) and builds a profile: tone, style, 10 to 15 vocabulary terms the business uses, a picture of the audience with their goals and pain points, and writing patterns such as sentence length, how headings are phrased and how calls to action are worded. Every field is editable, and it is worth editing. If the owner always says “service call” rather than “appointment”, put it in.

The voice is then used everywhere: outlines, drafts, polishing, topic suggestions and social posts. Brand voice is included from the Professional plan.

Stage 2: decide what to write

There are three ways topics arrive, and they all land in the same list under Topic Ideas.

• Generate Topics suggests ten at a time from your keyword groups, competitors, brand voice and existing pages. It avoids titles you already have, and topics you reject don’t come back. It needs keyword research and clustering done first.
• Monthly blog plan. On the 1st of each month, RankThat drafts a plan for every project with Search Console data or keyword lists. It looks at searches Google already shows the site for, keyword groups with no page, saved lists, gaps against competitors and seasonal peaks, then picks the best 12 posts from 24 candidates. Nothing is created until you click to add them to Topic Ideas.
• Weekly Ideas. Click Generate This Week’s Ideas for a batch that leans on content gaps first, then searches with low click-through, then trending and seasonal subjects. Each card says why it was recommended.

Topics also arrive from other tools: competitor alerts and content gaps, the keyword Strategy Builder, Keyword Magic and the AI visibility page.

Stage 3: the brief

A brief is the outline a writer would want before starting. From a topic, click Generate Brief, or create one directly in Content Briefs by entering a keyword, an article type (guide, how-to, listicle, review, comparison, tutorial) and a target length. A brief contains:

• an overview of the audience and what the searcher wants (search intent)
• a meta title of up to 60 characters and a meta description of up to 160
• 6 to 12 H2 sections, each with H3s, key points, a word target and keywords
• 4 to 6 FAQs written to answer the question directly
• tone guidance and 3 to 5 image ideas
• primary, secondary and related keyword lists

Every field can be edited, and you can export the brief to Google Docs if a human writer will take it from there. More on what makes a brief useful in the content brief glossary entry.

Stage 4: the draft

Click Generate Article from Brief, or go to Content › Articles and use Generate Article. Length runs from 500 to 10,000 words (2,500 by default) with up to 10 images. Behind the button, RankThat:

1. Reads up to 10 competing articles from Google’s results and notes their headings.
2. Builds the outline (or uses your brief), and adds up to two sections that at least two competitors cover and your outline missed.
3. Picks up to five internal links to your own pages, skipping pages that are already linked from many articles.
4. Writes the article in the brand voice, with a “Key Takeaways” box after the first section and an FAQ section at the end.
5. Runs a clean-up pass that strips stock AI phrasing and dashes and adds natural contractions.
6. Creates images: matching photos from the project’s image library first, otherwise generated images or simple infographics.

The draft opens in the editor, which has four tabs: Editor, Preview, SEO and Images. Select text to rephrase, simplify or turn it into bullets. The Content Score (0 to 100) compares the draft with Google’s top 10 on topic coverage, headings, keyword use, readability, completeness and length. An AI detection check scores how machine-like the writing reads and can rewrite the patterns it flags. When you’re happy, click Mark Ready.

Stage 5: publishing to WordPress

Ready articles appear in Content › Publish Queue. Choose Publish as: draft, pending review or live, and pick the author. On publish, RankThat uploads the images (the featured image becomes the WordPress featured image), adds your call to action, sets the default category and up to five tags, writes the SEO title, description and focus keyword into Rank Math or Yoast, and adds FAQ schema. If the site’s firewall blocks outside connections, the Bridge plugin picks the article up from inside WordPress within five minutes.

The Content Calendar is the other route. Add topics across a date range at a set number of posts per week, and RankThat avoids subjects the site already ranks for. One thing to know: when you generate articles from the calendar, each one is scheduled to go live on its calendar date. Review drafts before their dates, or publish from the queue as a WordPress draft if you want a second check inside WordPress.

A worked example: Bean & Barrel Coffee

Bean & Barrel sells specialty beans on WooCommerce. In October the monthly blog plan suggests 12 posts; the owner adds eight to Topic Ideas and rejects four that are too close to what competitors already cover well.

For “how to dial in espresso at home”, the brief proposes nine sections. The marketer swaps one for a section on their own house blend and adds two FAQs customers actually ask in the shop. The draft comes back in the brand voice (warm, a bit nerdy, no hype), with links to the grinder and espresso blend product pages. The Content Score is 74. She adds the shop’s real recipe (18 g in, 36 g out, 28 seconds), a photo from the roastery, and a line about why their beans need a slightly finer grind. Those details are what make the post worth ranking; no tool can supply them.

She publishes it to WordPress as a draft, the owner reads it in WordPress and hits publish.

Stage 6: keeping posts fresh

Posts decay. Every day, RankThat checks articles it published that have Search Console data and gives each a decay score, comparing position, clicks and impressions with about a month earlier. When the score passes a threshold, or a post older than a month gets impressions but no clicks, a refresh is created in Content Refresh with a strategy, keywords to add and competitor notes. AI Rewrite drafts the update, and applying it saves the old version and puts the article back to draft for review. The content refresh guide explains when a refresh beats a new post.

What else is in the content toolkit

• Topical Authority marks each keyword group as covered, partial or a gap, and can create topics for the gaps. See topical authority.
• Templates save an article setup with variables, such as “Best {{product}} for {{use_case}}”.
• Programmatic SEO turns a template and a pasted CSV into a batch of topics and articles, with a preview of the first 20 titles and duplicates skipped. Nothing in a batch publishes on its own.

What the content writer doesn’t do

• It doesn’t know your prices, your photos or your experience. Drafts are drafts. Add what only the business knows before publishing.
• It only publishes to WordPress. You can export to Google Docs for anything else.
• It doesn’t guarantee rankings. Google ranks helpful pages however they were written.
• Failed drafts need a retry. If generation fails twice, the article is marked failed and a Retry button appears.

Article allowances are 5 a month on Starter, 25 on Professional and unlimited on Enterprise (pricing). Published articles and refreshes are listed automatically under work completed in the monthly report.

Tip: spend your editing time on the first 150 words and the FAQ answers. They are what Google snippets and AI assistants quote most.