Content editing and maintenance guide
Set Acceptance Criteria for Outsourced WordPress Articles
Write the acceptance criteria into the brief: the reader outcome, required evidence, sources, factual owner, and revision rules. Then review the draft against them before it reaches WordPress.
On this page
Decide how you will accept a commissioned article before anyone writes it. Put the criteria in the brief: what the reader should be able to do afterward, which facts need evidence, which sources count, who confirms the facts, what the writer must not claim, and what happens when a draft falls short. Then review the delivered draft against that list, not against a general sense of whether it reads well.
This matters most for agencies and site owners who buy articles from freelancers or content services. A fluent draft is easy to produce. A draft that is accurate, specific to the business, and useful to its reader takes a brief that says so and a review that checks it.
Why acceptance belongs in the brief
Google’s guidance on helpful content includes a self-assessment question that applies directly to outsourced work: whether content is mass-produced by or outsourced to a large number of creators so that individual pages do not get as much attention or care. It also asks whether content has easily verified factual errors and whether it presents clear sourcing and evidence of the expertise involved. Google’s guidance on creating helpful content, checked September 27, 2026.
Those questions are about the finished page. The practical way to answer them for a commissioned article is to require the evidence up front and check it on delivery. If the brief says only “1,500 words on rose pruning”, the writer has no way to know what you will accept, and you have no basis for rejecting a generic draft. The same Google page says it has no preferred word count, so a length target alone tells the writer nothing about quality.
Planning which question an article should answer is a separate task, covered in use search questions to plan more useful pages. This guide starts once you know the question.
Define the reader outcome
Write one sentence that describes what the reader can do after reading. This is the main acceptance test.
- Weak: “An article about pruning roses.”
- Useful: “After reading, a homeowner with shrub roses can decide when to prune in their climate and make the three standard cuts without damaging the plant.”
A useful outcome names the reader, the task, and a result you can check. Add the scope limits beside it: what the article covers, what it leaves to another page, and which audience it is not for.
Specify evidence, sources, and exclusions
List the facts the article must support and what counts as support. Be specific about the kind of source.
| Requirement | What to specify |
|---|---|
| Primary sources | Which organizations count: a manufacturer, a standards body, a government agency, the business’s own records. Require a link beside each claim and the date the writer checked it. |
| Business facts | Prices, service areas, timelines, and guarantees come only from the factual owner, never from the writer’s assumptions. |
| Screenshots and photos | Who supplies them, whether they must be original, and how they are labeled. Illustrations must not be presented as screenshots. |
| First-hand material | Whether the article needs the business’s own procedure, examples, or observations, and who provides them. |
| Exclusions | Claims the writer must not make: invented statistics, customer stories, testimonials, “studies show” without a source, ranking or traffic promises, and competitor claims that are not documented on the competitor’s own pages. |
| AI use | Whether automation may be used and how it must be disclosed. Google’s guidance says AI or automation disclosures are useful where someone might ask how the content was created, and suggests adding them when readers would reasonably expect them (checked September 27, 2026). |
Name the factual owner: the person at the business who confirms that product details, prices, and procedures are correct. The writer drafts; the owner verifies. If no one can take that role, the article is not ready to commission.
A reusable acceptance sheet
Copy this into each brief and fill it in. The writer sees it before starting; the reviewer uses it on delivery.
ARTICLE ACCEPTANCE SHEET
Working title:
Reader outcome (one sentence):
In scope:
Out of scope (link these pages instead):
Factual owner (name, role):
Required evidence
[ ] Every outside claim links a primary source with a checked date
[ ] Business facts confirmed by the factual owner
[ ] Screenshots are original, labeled, and permitted
[ ] Examples marked as illustrative where they are not real cases
Exclusions
[ ] No invented data, quotes, customers, or test results
[ ] No ranking, traffic, or revenue promises
[ ] No unsupported competitor claims
Delivery
[ ] Draft plus a source list
[ ] Proposed title and meta description
[ ] List of open questions for the factual owner
Revision rule: one revision round for criteria not met;
a draft missing the reader outcome is returned, not edited.Review the draft against the criteria
Review in a fixed order so that fluent prose does not distract from missing substance.
- Outcome. Read the article as the reader in the outcome sentence. Can you do the task at the end? If not, stop: nothing else matters until this passes.
- Sources. Open every link. Confirm the page exists and says what the article claims. A link to a homepage or a page that does not mention the claim does not count.
- Business facts. Send the list of prices, timelines, and service claims to the factual owner for confirmation.
- Exclusions. Search the draft for numbers, percentages, quoted speech, and named companies. Each one needs a source or needs to go.
- Originality. Check whether the article adds the business’s own procedure or examples, or only restates what other pages say. Google’s guidance, checked September 27, 2026, asks whether content that draws on other sources avoids simply rewriting them and adds substantial value and originality.
- Metadata. Check the proposed title and description against the finished article.
Record each decision against the sheet so the writer knows exactly what to change.
Two sample acceptance decisions
These are illustrative decisions on fictional drafts for garden.example, not reviews of real work.
Draft A: accepted with one revision. The outcome passes: a reader can identify the right month and make the three cuts. Two sources link to a horticultural society’s pruning guidance and say what the article claims. One problem: the draft states that the studio “has pruned over 2,000 gardens”, which the factual owner did not supply. Decision: remove the figure or have the owner confirm it from records; everything else accepted.
Draft B: returned. The draft is well written and on topic, but it could describe any region, gives no timing guidance beyond “late winter or early spring”, and cites a blog post rather than a primary source for the claim that pruning in frost damages canes. The reader outcome fails. Decision: returned under the revision rule with the specific gaps listed, rather than rewritten by the editor.
After acceptance
Only an accepted draft goes into WordPress. Load it as a draft, check the rendered page, and set the title and description the review approved. In WP Visibility these are the Search title and Search description fields in the WP Visibility sidebar of the block editor, described in Set title and description templates. The plugin handles that page metadata; it does not research, fact-check, or certify the article.
Before publishing, give the page one last read against the WordPress SEO reference section on building a useful page. If an assistant helped produce any part of the draft, the routine in review an AI-written WordPress draft before publishing applies as well.