Content editing and maintenance guide
Review an AI-Written WordPress Draft Before Publishing
List every claim in the draft, verify each against a primary source or the business owner, and remove what you cannot support. A worked example with corrections.
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Treat an AI-written draft as an unverified source. Before publishing, pull every factual claim into a list, check each one against a primary source or the person who owns the fact, and remove or rewrite anything you cannot support. Then check the draft for invented citations, borrowed phrasing, missing qualifications, and promises the business cannot keep. The routine is the same whichever assistant wrote the draft.
Google has said its focus is on the quality of content, rather than how content is produced. Google’s February 2023 post on AI-generated content, checked September 27, 2026. Its guidance on generative AI says AI can be useful for research and structure, but that generating many pages without adding value for users may violate its spam policy on scaled content abuse, and asks publishers to focus on accuracy, quality, and relevance, including in titles, descriptions, and alt text. Google Search’s guidance on using generative AI content, checked September 27, 2026. The review below is how you add and confirm that value.
Extract the claims
Copy the draft into a working document and mark every sentence that states something checkable. Put each one in a claims ledger:
| Claim | Type | Source given | Verified against | Result |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Number, date, product fact, procedure step, quote, citation, comparison | Keep, correct, remove |
Include the claims that feel obvious. An assistant can state a plausible but wrong detail with the same confidence as a correct one, and the plausible ones are the ones a hurried editor skips.
Pay particular attention to:
- Numbers, percentages, and dates.
- Named studies, reports, organizations, and people.
- Quotations, which should be exact and attributable.
- Product specifications, prices, and compatibility.
- Legal, medical, financial, or safety statements.
- Comparisons with competitors.
Verify against primary sources
For each claim, find the original. That means the organization that created the fact: a manufacturer’s documentation, a government agency, a standards body, the software vendor, or the business’s own records.
- Open every link the draft cites. Confirm the page exists and says what the draft claims. A citation to a real site that does not contain the claim is as bad as an invented one.
- Search for any study or report by its exact title. If you cannot find it on the publisher’s site, treat it as unverified and leave it out.
- Check quotes against their source. If you cannot find the original wording, remove the quote marks and the attribution, or remove the sentence.
- Send business facts to the factual owner. Prices, service areas, timelines, and what is included come from the business, not from the assistant.
- Record the date you checked each outside source, so the next editor knows how current it is.
A claim that fails verification gets corrected with a source, narrowed to what the source supports, or removed. Do not replace an invented statistic with a different number you have not checked.
A labeled example with corrections
This is a fictional draft excerpt for garden.example, written to show common problems. It is not a real assistant transcript.
Draft: “According to a 2024 University of Horticulture study, 78% of roses pruned in autumn fail to bloom. Our team of certified arborists has helped over 5,000 clients. We guarantee results within one season. As experts say, ‘prune early, bloom often.’”
| Problem | Why it fails | Correction |
|---|---|---|
| “2024 University of Horticulture study, 78%” | No such study or institution could be found | Remove. If timing matters, cite a real horticultural source’s pruning guidance and state only what it says |
| “certified arborists” | The owner confirms the staff are garden designers, not arborists | Replace with the real role: “garden designers” |
| “over 5,000 clients” | No figure was supplied by the business | Remove, or use a figure the owner confirms from records |
| “We guarantee results within one season” | The business offers no guarantee | Remove. Describe what the service does include |
| “As experts say” | An anonymous quote with no source | Remove |
Corrected: “The Royal Horticultural Society says shrub roses can be pruned in late winter, when growth is just resuming. Our garden designers can show you where to make each cut during a consultation.”
The corrected version is shorter and less impressive. Every statement in it has a source: the pruning timing follows the RHS guide to pruning shrub roses, checked September 27, 2026, and the business details come from the owner. That is the requirement.
Check phrasing, qualifications, and permissions
Facts are not the only thing to check.
Borrowed phrasing. Take two or three distinctive sentences and search for them in quotation marks. If the wording appears elsewhere, rewrite it or cite and quote the source properly. Google’s spam policies list “stitching or combining content from different web pages without adding value” as an example of scaled content abuse. Google’s spam policies, checked September 27, 2026.
Missing qualifications. An assistant may state a general rule without its exceptions. If a step only applies to one climate, product version, or plan, say so beside the step.
Product claims. If the draft describes software, including an SEO plugin, compare every behavior with the vendor’s current documentation. A feature that exists in a development version or a competitor’s product is not a feature of the one you are describing.
Permissions. Customer names, project photos, testimonials, and logos need the owner’s permission. Remove any the draft invented.
Promises. Check every call to action against what the business actually does. “Get a free quote in 24 hours” is a commitment someone has to keep.
Decide on disclosure and publication
Google’s helpful content guidance suggests asking whether the use of automation is self-evident to visitors through disclosures, and says AI or automation disclosures are useful for content where someone might wonder how it was created. Google’s guidance on creating helpful content, checked September 27, 2026. The same guidance recommends accurate authorship information, such as bylines where readers expect them. Decide your policy once and apply it to every article, rather than case by case.
The draft is ready to publish when:
- Every row in the claims ledger is verified, corrected, or removed.
- The factual owner has approved business facts.
- The title and description describe the corrected article, not the original draft.
- A named person has read the whole piece and accepts responsibility for it.
Keep drafting and approval separate
If an assistant writes drafts directly into WordPress, keep them as drafts and publish only after the review. If a connected assistant creates or edits a draft through WP Visibility, that is content work and is separate from the plugin’s SEO review queue, so publishing and factual approval remain your normal WordPress editorial process. Direct SEO writes an assistant makes through WP Visibility’s abilities, such as a post’s search title and description, wait in that queue only when the Assistant connection and Autopilot modules are on and Assistant changes is set to Hold for my review; see Approve or reject a proposal and, if a change never shows up there, the empty queue checks.
For commissioned work from human writers, the same checks belong in the brief: see set acceptance criteria for outsourced WordPress articles. The WordPress SEO reference covers building a page that answers the question once the facts are settled.