Can I edit the outline before the article is written?

Yes. The outline step is visible and editable before drafting begins — you can reorder sections, add points, or add special instructions. You can also skip straight to the draft if you'd rather review at the end.

How long does an article take?

Scheduled articles are generated in the background and land in your review queue. A manually triggered article typically completes within minutes, depending on how many claims the fact-checker needs to verify.

What happens if a step fails?

Each step checkpoints its output. If image generation fails, the retry resumes at image generation — it never re-drafts or re-verifies work that already succeeded, and you're never silently left with a half-finished article.

How SEOtopilot Works: From Keyword to Published Post

The pipeline, step by step

Every article SEOtopilot produces goes through the same pipeline. Nothing is skipped — especially not the fact-check.

1. Live SERP research

When an article starts, we fetch the current top-ranking results for the target keyword, along with People Also Ask questions and related searches. This is live data at generation time, not a cached database — so the outline reflects what's actually ranking today.

2. Outline

An outline is generated from the SERP structure, your site's brand profile, and any special instructions you've added. It's presented for editing before drafting begins — reorder it, cut sections, add your own. Or skip the step; it's optional by design.

3. Draft, in your voice

The draft is written section by section, conditioned on samples of your existing writing — several pieces, not a single URL — plus your tone preferences and banned phrases. More on that at brand voice training.

4. The fact-check pass

This is the step nobody else makes mandatory. Every factual claim and statistic in the draft is extracted, and each one is checked against a live web source. The result is an annotated draft:

Verified claims carry their source and a supporting quote.
Unverified claims are flagged — we couldn't find a source, so you shouldn't trust it blindly.
Contradicted claims are flagged in red — a source actively disputes what the draft said.

The system never guesses a claim into the verified column. If verification is uncertain, the claim stays flagged. Read AI fact-checking for the full mechanics, and AI hallucinations in SEO content for why this matters more than most tools admit.

5. On-page SEO

Meta title and description, Article and FAQ structured data, heading-structure validation, image alt text, and contextual internal links into your existing content — placed mid-sentence where a reader would actually click, not bolted on at the end.

6. Quality score

A deterministic 0–100 score summarises structure, fact-check coverage, length adequacy, and linking. Fact-check coverage is weighted heaviest, because it's the part that protects your reputation. The scoring is explained at the quality score.

7. Review — then publish

The finished article lands in a review queue with all its annotations visible. Approve it, edit it, regenerate any section (regeneration is unlimited and never consumes your allowance), or reject it. Auto-publish exists, but it's opt-in per site — the review gate is on by default, as covered in the review workflow.

Publishing pushes to your connected CMS — WordPress, Shopify, Webflow, and more — with the article's metadata and structured data intact.

8. After publish

Once your analytics are connected, published articles are monitored for decay and refresh opportunities, closing the loop between what you published and what you should write next. See content decay detection.