Writing Assistant

Conductor Intelligence’s Writing Assistant provides real-time insights for content that you can write and edit directly in Conductor. Optimize your content before you publish it—or pull in the content of a live page to learn how best to approach optimization. Whether focused on traditional SEO or on AEO / GEO, Writing Assistant maximizes the impact of your efforts, and gives your brand a leg up in AI responses and traditional SERPs.

​

Overview

When you open Writing Assistant, you’ll see the Your Drafts table with all your existing drafts. This table includes information about each draft, including:

• The draft’s title.
• The Target Keyword.
• Assignee.
• Status.
• Who created it.
• Who last updated it.
• When it was last updated.

You’ll also be able to edit the draft by clicking Open or delete the draft by clicking the Delete icon (the trash can).

​

Create a Draft

Click Start a New Draft. The Set up your draft activity has four steps: Set targets, Review comparison pages, Refine brief, and Customize style. Writing Assistant then analyzes both Google rankings and AI engine responses for your topics, so your brief reflects how your content can perform across search.

​

Set targets

1. Under What do you want to write about?, choose:
   • The web property you’re writing for.
   • The AI engines to analyze.
   • The location and language.
   
2. Enter up to five topics you want to create or optimize content for. A topic can be any prompt you want to write about. Topics don’t need to be tracked in your account—they’re unrelated to the tracked topics used in AI Search Performance reporting. As you enter topics, Writing Assistant also suggests other ideas from your tracked prompts that you already track that you might want to add.
   
3. Optionally, if you’re optimizing an existing page, enter its URL under Add a page to optimize, or click Add next to one of the Suggested URLs based on your prompts.
   
4. Below, click Start Analysis.
5. In Review opportunity, review how you perform today for each topic:
   • Your visibility. An overall rating (such as Low or Medium) that combines your brand mentions, AI citations, and Google rank.
   • Brand Mentions and AI Citations. How often AI responses mention your brand and cite your site as a source.
   • Google Rank. Your highest rank in Google search results.
   • Top Brand. The brand with the strongest presence for the topic.
   
6. To see what’s driving a topic’s visibility, click its arrow (>). The details include:
   • Google search. Your highest rank, the top-ranking sites, and total monthly search volume (MSV).
   • AI answer engines. Your visibility, plus the brands that AI responses mention and cite.
   • Who are the top brands in this topic area? Each leading brand’s mentions, AI citations, and Google rank.
   • Full AI responses. Each engine’s complete response, marked with whether your brand was mentioned and cited.
   
7. Click Continue.

​

Review comparison pages

1. Review the pages Writing Assistant selected for comparison. To hide a page that isn’t relevant to your topic, competitors, or intended content type, click its eye icon. Writing Assistant uses the pages you keep to generate your insights and recommendations.
   Keep at least seven comparison pages. Writing Assistant needs a minimum of seven to generate guidance.
   
2. Click Continue.

​

Refine brief

1. In Fine-tune your draft requirements, review the factors your draft will be graded on. Writing Assistant generates each one with AI, based on your targets. You can refine any factor now, or later while you work on your draft:
   • Objective. Define what you want your audience to know or do after reading.
   • Audience. Describe your target readers to help tailor your tone and depth.
   • Content Type. Choose a format that best serves your readers’ intent.
   • Journey Stage. Select where your readers are in their process to shape how you present information.
   • Subtopics. Incorporate these key themes to ensure your content is comprehensive.
   • Questions to Answer. Identify specific questions you want your content to help readers answer.
   • Body Copy Suggestions. Use these terms to make sure your content touches on important entities. Terms are grouped as Important, Supporting, and Additional. Terms you add go in Important.
   
2. Click Continue.

​

Customize style

1. Under Add Knowledge Sources, upload up to five files or add plain text as guidance for Conductor’s AI engine to use as it generates content for this draft. You can reuse Previously Uploaded sources, so you don’t have to upload the same files again for multiple drafts. What file types can be uploaded?
2. Under Select Content Profile, if you want, select a Content Profile for this draft that Conductor should use when generating AI content. Click Manage to edit your profiles.
3. Click Continue. Your brief is saved and your draft opens, ready for you to start writing.

​

Editing Your Draft

​

Topic, URL, and Competitors

At the top of Writing Assistant, you’ll find the settings that determine:

• The topic for which you want to generate assistance.
• The URL, if entered, for the page you want to optimize. Writing Assistant will pull the content from this page into the text editor automatically.
• The competitors you have configured to gather insights from.

You can click any of the options to revise the settings for your draft.

​

Page Title and Meta Description

You can enter a Title tag and Meta description for the page to get assistance for those elements as well. The Target topic and Tag length indicators on the right show when your entries meet best practices for these elements. You can also use AI-suggestions for each. Just click the AI menu icon (the green lightbulb) to generate suggestions. A list of up to 5 options appears.

​

Text Editor

The text editor in Writing Assistant is a standard WYSIWYG editor that lets you craft content the way you would in your CMS of choice. You can also pre-fill the editor by entering the URL for an already-published page in the optional URL field at the top.

​

Outlines

Starting from a blank slate and not sure where to start? Use the AI menu icon (the green lightbulb) to generate a content outline. You can enter an Objective and Audience for the outline to give more context to Conductor’s AI engine. After you confirm your input, Conductor generates a content outline based on these inputs and a selection of insights including body copy suggestions, People Also Ask questions, and h2 tags from top-ranking content for the entered topic. Once the outline generation is complete, you can:

• Accept the outline (keeps the generated text)
• Reject the outline (discards the generated text)
• Retry generating the outline (sends a new request with the same inputs).

​

Expand or Shorten Content

Want a co-pilot to help you build out and finetune your content? When you highlight any text in a draft you’re working on, the AI menu (the green lightbulb icon) appears next to the text selection. When you select the Expand Selection or Shorten Selection option, Writing Assistant expands or shortens the highlighted text based on the context of your full draft and all your insights. After Writing Assistant expands or shortens the content, you can:

• Accept it (keeps the generated text)
• Retry generating it (creates new text)
• Cancel (discards the generated text)

​

Generate an Entire Draft

Beta Unlike other AI writing tools that produce generic content, our draft generation uses Conductor’s search insights as source material to create content that’s both high-quality and strategically aligned with your search performance goals. The result is content that not only reads well but is grounded in what performs well in search.

1. Click the Write with AI button and select Generate Draft.
2. If you want, select any Content Profile you’ve configured to refine the usage and style for your draft.

Add any extra instructions for our AI engine to consider for this piece of content. Want to keep working with what was created? Built-in AI revision lets you refine the draft with natural language prompts, so you can iterate quickly and stay in control of the final product.

​

Generate Link Suggestions

Get a list of highly-relevant pages on your site directly from Writing Assistant. Then, easily insert a link from your content to the related page. Instead of basic keyword matching, suggestions are based on semantic similarities between the text you highlight and pages on your site. You can get suggested links for a whole draft or for just a selection of your text.

• For your whole draft:
  1. Above the draft, click Insert Links.
  2. Click Generate Link Suggestions.
  3. Review the options that appear. You can click to Review an option to see how Writing Assistant would update the selection with anchor text and suggested link.
  4. When you want to add a link, click Accept.
     
• For a selection of your text:
  1. Highlight text in the editor.
  2. Click the Get help from AI button.
     
  3. Click Insert Links.
  4. Click Generate Link Suggestions.
  5. Review the options that appear. You can click to Review an option to see how Writing Assistant would update the selection with anchor text and suggested link.
  6. When you want to add a link, click Accept.

​

Revise your draft with AI

You can use Writing Assistant’s AI engine to revise selections of your existing draft.

1. Highlight text in the editor.
2. Click the Get help from AI button.
   
3. Click Revise Draft.
4. In the form that appears, enter instructions for how the text should be revised and click Revise. You can use natural language instructions and Conductor’s AI will update the text accordingly.
   
5. When you are satisfied with the revised text, click Insert Text.

To the left of the text editor, you can review the insights Conductor generates based on the entered topic and content in the editor, including:

• AI-generated guidance about Intent:
  • Objective
  • Audience
  • Journey Stage—possible stages are: Awareness, Consideration, Conversion, and Retention
• Guidance about your topical coverage:
  • Questions your audience might have related to your topic, feedback on how well your content answers those questions, and suggestions for how you could improve your content to better answer the questions.
  • Subtopics relevant to your topic.
  • Body copy suggestions covering important, supporting, and additional terms you might want to write about.
• Other guidance, including:
  • Content Type
  • Content length
  • Readability
  • Title tag patterns
  • Meta description patterns
  • Heading patterns (h1–h3)

​

Customize Your Insights

Based on the insights Conductor provides, you might want to:

• Add or remove keyword suggestions.
• Set different goals for length or readability.
• Add or remove questions for the content to answer.

To do so, you can use the links on each editable insight to customize the specific insights to make the experience as relevant to your content creation as possible.

​

Score Your Content

Your Content Score provides a simple way to understand how to prioritize your optimization and understand your draft’s quality. Conductor’s Content Score uses AI to provide actionable insights at both a broad and granular level across two core signals:

• Topical Coverage: This dimension assesses whether your content comprehensively addresses the target topic. It evaluates the inclusion of relevant subtopics, the appropriate use of key terminology in the draft’s body copy, and the extent to which the content answers relevant questions (such as those found in People Also Ask results or generated by AI).
• Intent Alignment: This dimension evaluates how well your content satisfies the specific needs and objectives of the target audience for a given topic. It considers whether the content fulfills the user’s intent and is appropriate for their level of understanding and stage in the customer journey.

Your Content Score appears at the top of your draft, and updates as you edit content in Writing Assistant’s editor. Both AEO and SEO signals influence your Content Score through the brief’s questions, subtopics, and body copy suggestions.

​

Manage Your Draft

​

Assign teammates and statuses to your draft

To help you manage your writing efforts, you can set statuses for and assign users to your drafts:

• On the Writing Assistant landing page.
  
• In the draft itself.
  

Note that users of any user type may assign or be assigned drafts.

​

Saving and working with your draft

Need more time working on your draft in the text editor? Conductor auto-saves your content if you pause more than 5 seconds. When you want to open a previously saved draft, just click the Document icon and select Open Draft.

​

Restore previous versions of your draft

As you edit and save your draft, Creator will store your version history. Just click the View History icon to open your version history. After opening your version history, you’ll be able to select from each time-stamped saved version. Click Restore this version if you want to revert your draft to that previous version.

​

Extending your draft and insights

Want to pass what you learn on to your content team? Just click Download Brief below your insights to generate a Microsoft .docx file with all your draft’s insights. You’ll see the draft from the text editor along with all the insights you see in the platform.

​

Delete your draft

Want to start fresh? Just click the Delete button.

​

Using Writing Assistant

• Prepare to create or optimize with Conductor by Training Your AI Assistant
• Drafting New Content with AI
• Optimizing Content with AI
• Best Practices for Creating Full Length Drafts in Writing Assistant

​

FAQs

Review this feature’s frequently asked questions