Content Operations

Content operations turns a citation gap into a publishable page. For a prompt where AI platforms cite competitors and not you, SurfacedBy builds a research brief, generates a draft from it, lets you edit and add rich media, and publishes the result to a connected channel.

There are two kinds of content: full pages and short social posts. A full page goes through the research, brief, and draft stages below and publishes to a CMS (WordPress or Shopify) as a draft for you to take live. A short social post skips the heavy pipeline and publishes to LinkedIn. See Social posts for the short path.

Generation is automated. Your job is to review and approve at each stage; nothing is generated against your wishes and nothing is published without you.

The lifecycle

A content project moves through clear stages.

• Brief. A research brief is generated for the project. While it runs, the project reads as generating; when it finishes it is ready for your review.
• Brief review. You read the brief, approve it, or request changes. A draft is only generated from an approved brief.
• Draft. The draft is generated from the approved brief. While it runs the project reads as generating a draft; when it finishes it is ready to edit.
• Draft review. You edit the draft, regenerate individual sections, and add rich media.
• Publish. The finished draft is published to a connected channel. The project is then marked published.

You can archive a project, and you can restore it later. A project that is mid-generation, awaiting review, or already published is locked from destructive edits so an in-flight run is never lost.

The research brief

Before any draft is written, SurfacedBy assembles a research pack. It draws on your brand knowledge and the inputs you attached to the project, the pages that currently win this prompt on AI platforms and in search (so the brief can name real competitors and the reference pages the draft will cite), and your own products and key pages (so the brief positions your real offerings and suggests real internal links instead of placeholders). This step is deterministic: it gathers supporting facts and sources rather than writing prose, so it does not spend generation credits. The brief you review is grounded in that pack, which keeps the eventual draft tied to real evidence rather than invented claims.

Brand knowledge

Brand knowledge is a reusable set of facts, product details, voice, and notes that every brief for a domain can draw on. You add your own entries once and SurfacedBy reuses them across projects.

SurfacedBy also finds your product and offering pages from your own site and adds them here as suggestions marked for review. You confirm the ones you want your content to draw on, fix a title, or remove the rest, and the Brand knowledge area stays flagged until you have cleared the queue. Only confirmed entries ground your briefs and suggest internal links, so nothing you have not reviewed reaches your content.

The draft and the editor

The draft opens in a rich editor. You can:

• Edit the text directly. Your edits are saved server-side; nothing lives only in the browser.
• Regenerate a section. Rewrite one section of the draft into a new version without touching the rest. This is a paid action that spends credits per pass.
• Propose an evidence-grounded rewrite. Select a passage and request a suggested rewrite tied to the project's sources, then accept or reject the suggestion.

Rich media

You can enrich a draft with charts, images, and video. Regenerating a chart, picking a video, generating an image, or uploading your own each spends a media credit. Rich media is available from a higher plan than the base content surface; when it is not unlocked, the editor explains which plan adds it.

Publishing

Publishing sends the finished draft to a channel you have already connected as a publish target, on the Integrations page. The behavior depends on the channel:

• WordPress and Shopify (CMS). The post is created as a draft on the remote site, never published live automatically. After SurfacedBy ships the draft, the outcome panel links you to the remote editor and reminds you to take the post live, because AI platforms can only find content that is publicly published.
• LinkedIn (social). A short social post publishes live to your LinkedIn feed once you confirm. LinkedIn has no draft state, so the post is public as soon as you approve it; the publish action says so before it sends.

A connected, active publish target is required, and the channel has to match the content: a full article publishes to a CMS, a short social post publishes to LinkedIn. Publishing is idempotent: re-clicking publish for the same project and target returns the existing result instead of creating a duplicate.

Social posts

A social post is the short path. Instead of a full page, SurfacedBy writes a brief LinkedIn post from a single signal you already have, such as a prompt where you are not cited yet or a recent visibility win.

• Start it from an opportunity. Use Create post on an opportunity to open a short drawer. SurfacedBy fills in the angle and the supporting facts from that opportunity; you can edit the angle, then generate. Generation spends one credit.
• One short pass. A social post skips the research, brief, and draft pipeline. It is a single short generation you review on its own lightweight page, where you can copy it, regenerate it, or publish it.
• Publish to LinkedIn. Connect LinkedIn on the Integrations page, then publish the post live from the review page. LinkedIn does not share post metrics through the connection, so engagement is not tracked in SurfacedBy after you post.

Credits and quality

Brief and draft generation are funded by your workspace Credits balance, and each generation pass debits that balance. A project tracks how many credits it has used so the cost is visible. You can set a quality tier on a generation when you want a more thorough pass; the tier you choose affects the cost.

Plan gating

Content operations requires the Professional plan or higher. On lower plans the surface shows a locked preview that names the plan that unlocks it. Rich media sits behind a higher media tier within that, and the editor states which plan adds it when it is locked.