Publish an article
You have connected a CMS, analytics, and Search Console, or you have connected nothing and intend to publish by hand, which works too. This page is what happens next: one article, from draft to measured.
Draft it
Section titled “Draft it”An article starts as a content asset. Either an agent drafts it, grounded in product truth so it can only claim what actually shipped, or you write it yourself with + Add asset. Give it a date on the content calendar if it belongs to a schedule; an undated draft publishes just as well.
The draft’s slug matters more than it looks: it becomes the article’s path, and that path is how every measurement finds its way back to this article. A rename after publishing orphans the numbers.
Publish it
Section titled “Publish it”Publish now in the asset drawer runs the gate: brand-safety lint first, then the autonomy check for the channel. The default outcome is queued for approval, and the approval in your queue carries the exact payload that will be sent, so what you approve is what goes out.
On approval, the publish runs through the active cms binding. If the connection already holds the article as a draft it updates that draft in place rather than creating a twin; tags and categories are created on the site if they do not exist; a linked featured image is uploaded as real bytes and attached. The post’s published URL comes back and is recorded on the asset. From this moment the article has the identity everything else keys on.
Measure it
Section titled “Measure it”Nothing further is asked of you. A collector passes over published articles every six hours and records one reading per metric per calendar day.
| What | When it arrives |
|---|---|
| The published post, live on your site | Immediately on approval |
| Pageviews and sessions | Usually the same day; a day keeps settling for up to two more |
| Search impressions, clicks, position | After Google indexes the page, plus a further two to three day reporting lag |
| Enough history for a decay verdict | 56 daily readings, sooner with Backfill history |
The two waits are different in kind. Analytics is a processing delay with a known bound. Search is gated on indexing, which is unpredictable, so days of zero at the start are normal and say nothing about the article.
Numbers land in three places: the asset drawer’s metrics section, the campaign’s metrics panel, and the content view, which is where per-article search performance, decay watching, and the topic coverage map live. Metrics and attribution is the honest tour of all of it.
No integrations? Publish by hand
Section titled “No integrations? Publish by hand”The manual path is a legitimate way to run the whole loop, not a fallback. Draft exactly as above, publish the text through your own CMS login, then use Mark as published on the asset with the post’s URL. Numbers are typed in rather than collected: when the article runs as part of an experiment, read search impressions and clicks off the provider dashboards and enter them with Record results, where they feed baselines and verdicts exactly like collected ones. Average position is the one number you cannot type in: it only means anything weighted by impressions across days, and a flat figure copied from a dashboard is not that quantity.
What happens after
Section titled “What happens after”Measurement is not the end of the loop; it is the input to it. An article that used to earn search impressions and slows down gets flagged as decaying, with a refresh proposal citing both windows. Demand nothing answers shows up on the topic coverage map as a topic with no asset. And when two ways of saying something compete, an experiment settles it with per-arm numbers instead of an argument.
Next steps
Section titled “Next steps”- Metrics and attribution: what every number means, and when it appears.
- Run marketing experiments: deliberate comparison with a verdict.
- Autonomy for marketing actions: what publishes without asking, and what never does.