Editorial planning
What a Brief Must Contain Before a Draft Starts
A brief has to give the writer every content field they need without coming back to ask. If one is missing, the draft rests on a guess.
Before a draft starts, the brief has to carry the content fields the writer can use without coming back to ask: search intent, audience, angle, structure, allowed sources, approval criteria and explicit limits. If any one of these is missing, the draft starts on a guess. In RankAI the default is human approval of a version. Automatic publishing is turned on per site and still goes through the checks.
The content fields, in the order you need them
The brief is the working sheet that comes before the writing. These are the fields that matter for getting a draft started:
- Intent and reference search phrase: not a volume, but the phrase the piece has to answer.
- Audience and distinct usefulness: who the piece speaks to, and what it adds compared with the other articles in the plan.
- Angle and thesis: the position the article takes, in one sentence.
- Minimum structure: the blocks that have to be there, without dictating every paragraph.
- Allowed sources and usable facts: what the writer may state and what they may not invent.
- Approval criteria: who approves the version and on what basis, decided before the draft is written.
- Limits: what the piece must not do, including the site's technical constraints.
These fields answer the question about content. On their own they are not enough to make the brief work, because a field filled in without an owner is still someone else's guess.
A decision map with owners
RankAI suggests pairing the content fields with a decision map: for each field in the brief, who decides and when. This is our operational proposal, not a universal standard. The rule that goes with it is simple: a field with no name and no date is a guess, not a decision.
The table below is an empty template to fill in. Cells marked “—” hold no real data; they only show where the confirmation goes.
| Decision | Owner | Confirmation (name and date) |
|---|---|---|
| Intent and search phrase | — | — |
| Audience and distinct usefulness | — | — |
| Angle and thesis | — | — |
| Minimum structure | — | — |
| Allowed sources | — | — |
| Approval criteria | — | — |
| Limits | — | — |
The map does not replace the fields; it makes them checkable. If a row is left without a name and a date, the draft starts on a guess and should be treated as one.
Original RankAI contribution. The decision→owner map and the rule “a field with no name and date = a guess” are an operational proposal from RankAI, not a universal standard. They separate the pre-draft brief from the diff review: here you settle the content and the criteria before writing, while the diff review comes later, on the version that was produced. These are two different moments and should be kept apart. The table above is a template to fill in: cells marked “—” are not real data.
One limit to keep in mind
A complete brief does not guarantee a good draft. It sets the conditions for one and makes visible who decided what. On the technical trial the limits are 3 articles per month and 3 in total, so the number of briefs to prepare is small and needs planning. For the full picture on the editorial plan and approval, see the in-depth page.