> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.rankforce.co/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.
# Content Engine: AI-powered content briefs and drafts
> The Rankforce Content Engine researches keywords, builds SEO briefs, and generates publish-ready drafts tailored to your audience and business goals.
The Rankforce Content Engine handles the full content production pipeline — from identifying what your target audience is searching for, to building a detailed SEO brief, to generating a publish-ready draft you can send directly to your CMS. Unlike general-purpose AI writing tools, the Content Engine operates with full knowledge of your site's existing content, your target keywords, your competitive landscape, and your business goals, producing drafts that are strategically positioned rather than generically written.
The Content Engine is available on the **Growth** and **Scale** plans. It is not included in the Starter plan. To upgrade, go to **Settings → Billing → Change Plan**.
## What the Content Engine does
Identifies high-value keyword clusters around your topic, including primary terms, semantic variants, and long-tail questions your audience is actively searching.
Builds a structured brief covering target keywords, audience intent, competitor content gaps, a recommended outline, and internal linking opportunities.
Produces a complete, publish-ready article draft structured around the brief, tailored to your specified audience and business goals.
Sends approved drafts directly to your WordPress or Framer CMS as a draft post, ready for your final review before publishing.
## Creating a content brief
A content brief is the foundation of every piece of content the engine produces. Investing a few minutes in the brief settings produces a significantly better draft than launching straight to generation.
Navigate to **Content → New Content** in the Rankforce dashboard.
Type the primary keyword or topic you want to target — for example, *"B2B SaaS onboarding best practices"*. Be as specific as possible. The engine uses this as the seed for keyword research and brief construction.
Select your target audience from the dropdown (you can define custom audiences under **Settings → Audiences**), and specify the content's business goal: **Organic traffic**, **Lead generation**, **Product awareness**, or **Customer education**. These settings shape the tone, depth, and call-to-action strategy of the generated draft.
The engine surfaces a keyword cluster built around your seed term. Each keyword is shown with estimated monthly search volume, keyword difficulty, and a relevance score. Deselect any keywords that are off-target before proceeding — they will be excluded from the brief and draft.
The engine generates a full content brief (see below for what it includes). Review each section, make any edits, and click **Generate draft** when you're satisfied. You can regenerate any individual section of the brief without rebuilding the whole thing.
## What a content brief includes
Every brief produced by the Content Engine contains six structured sections.
### 1. Keyword cluster
The primary target keyword plus a curated set of semantic variants, related questions, and long-tail phrases. Each keyword is tagged with its role in the content (primary, secondary, or supporting) and its recommended placement (title, H2, body).
**Example for the seed "B2B SaaS onboarding best practices":**
| Keyword | Role | Monthly searches | KD |
| ---------------------------------- | ---------- | ---------------- | -- |
| B2B SaaS onboarding best practices | Primary | 1,400 | 42 |
| SaaS user onboarding checklist | Secondary | 880 | 38 |
| How to improve SaaS onboarding | Secondary | 590 | 35 |
| SaaS onboarding email sequence | Supporting | 320 | 29 |
| Time to value SaaS | Supporting | 260 | 44 |
### 2. Audience intent analysis
A concise breakdown of what a user searching your primary keyword is actually trying to accomplish — their informational need, their level of existing knowledge, and the decision or action they want to be able to take after reading.
**Example:** *"Searchers are typically SaaS product managers or customer success leads who already run an onboarding flow but suspect it underperforms. They want a concrete framework they can evaluate against their current process — not a conceptual overview. The content should move quickly to actionable structure and include specific metrics (e.g., time to first value, completion rate) they can use to benchmark."*
### 3. Competitor gap analysis
The engine analyzes the top five organically ranking pages for your primary keyword and identifies:
* Topics and subtopics covered by competitors that your site doesn't currently address
* Angles and perspectives that are absent from existing content (gaps you can own)
* Content length benchmarks and format patterns (listicle, guide, case study, etc.)
### 4. Recommended outline
A full H1–H3 heading structure for the article, with each heading incorporating target keywords from the cluster where natural. Section order is informed by both the competitor gap analysis and the audience intent profile.
### 5. Internal linking opportunities
A list of existing pages on your site that the draft should link to, with suggested anchor text for each. This is pre-populated from Rankforce's crawl data and ensures the new content slots into your internal link architecture from the moment it's published.
### 6. Suggested metadata
A recommended meta title and meta description for the new page, pre-populated in the brief so they are ready to populate your SEO plugin when the draft is sent to your CMS.
## How drafts are tailored to audience and goals
The Content Engine does not produce a generic article based solely on keyword density. Before generating the draft, it conditions its output on three factors you control:
**Audience definition** — You define audiences in **Settings → Audiences** with attributes including industry, seniority, technical level, and primary pain points. The draft's vocabulary, assumed baseline knowledge, and example choices are all adjusted to match the selected audience.
**Business goal** — The goal setting shapes the draft's structure and call-to-action approach. A **Lead generation** goal produces content that builds toward a product-relevant conversion point. An **Organic traffic** goal produces content optimized for ranking and shareability with a lighter product presence. A **Customer education** goal produces detailed, instructional content appropriate for your help center or knowledge base.
**Existing site content** — The engine has full visibility into your site's content inventory via Rankforce's crawl data. It avoids duplicating topics you already cover well and instead positions the new draft to complement and extend your existing content — linking to it where relevant rather than competing with it.
Drafts generated for a **Product awareness** goal automatically weave in your product's key use cases and differentiators based on the product context you provide during Rankforce onboarding. Keep your product context up to date under **Settings → Product Context** so the engine reflects your current messaging.
## Sending a draft to your CMS
Once you've reviewed and approved a draft, you can send it to your WordPress or Framer site in a single click.
Open the draft from **Content → Drafts**. The editor shows the full article with inline annotations indicating where specific keywords appear, which headings incorporate brief keywords, and where internal links have been inserted.
Edit any section of the draft directly in the Rankforce editor. All standard formatting options are available: headings, bold, italic, lists, blockquotes, and links. Changes are saved automatically.
Click **Send to CMS** in the top-right toolbar. Select the target site (if you have multiple connected sites) and the destination in your CMS — for WordPress, choose the post type and category; for Framer, choose the CMS collection.
Review the send summary, which shows the page title, slug, target category, meta title, and meta description that will be created. Click **Confirm**. The draft is created in your CMS with status **Draft** — it is not published automatically.
Log in to your WordPress admin or Framer dashboard to do a final review and click Publish when ready. Keeping the final publish step in your CMS ensures your editorial workflow and any scheduled-publish integrations are preserved.
Sending to CMS does not publish the content. It creates a draft post in your CMS that only you and your team can see. You control when — and whether — it goes live.
## Editing and approving content
Rankforce treats AI-generated drafts as a starting point, not a finished product. Every draft is designed to be edited.
Yes. Hover over any section in the draft editor and click the **Regenerate section** icon that appears in the margin. You can provide additional instructions — for example, "make this section more concise" or "add a specific example from the e-commerce industry" — and the engine regenerates only that section without changing the rest of the draft.
On the **Scale** plan, drafts support multi-user editing with comment threads and a change history. Collaborators can leave inline comments on any paragraph, and all edits are tracked with author attribution. On the **Growth** plan, drafts support single-user editing only.
The brief is permanently linked to the draft and remains accessible from the draft editor under the **Brief** tab. If you edit the draft significantly and want to regenerate sections, the brief serves as the reference document. Briefs can also be exported as a PDF or shared via a view-only link — useful if you want a human writer to work from the brief instead of the AI draft.
## Plan availability
Includes the Content Engine with up to 20 content briefs and drafts per month. Single-user draft editing. Supports one connected site.
Includes the Content Engine with unlimited briefs and drafts. Multi-user collaborative editing. Supports up to 10 connected sites. Priority generation queue.
To view full plan details or upgrade your account, go to **Settings → Billing** or visit the [Rankforce pricing page](https://rankforce.com/pricing).