How publishing works

A typical article moves through these states:

1. Planned — on the content calendar with a keyword and scheduled date.
2. Generating / generated — Rankealo writes the draft and runs quality checks.
3. Draft — editable; may await your review if the publish gate flagged issues.
4. Publishing — transient state while the CMS request is in flight (claim held).
5. Published — live on your site; URL and cms_post_id stored.

After generation, Rankealo evaluates the article with the publish gate — a composite score from SEO preflight (content + meta), context usage, coverage, lead quality, claim quality, consistency checks, content integrity, genericity signals, and (when enabled) a semantic quality judge.

Two outcomes:

• Ready — zero blockers. Safe to publish manually or via autopublish (if enabled and billing allows).
• Needs review — one or more blockers remain (e.g. critical SEO failure, high-risk unsupported claim, content integrity issue, score below threshold). Fix or edit before publishing.

Internally, articles also map to ready, caution, or blocked quality states for autopilot. Autopublish only fires when the autopublish action is publish — blocked or held drafts stay in the app for you.

When you click Publish (or autopublish runs), Rankealo:

1. Verifies billing allows publish for the domain (paid subscription active).
2. Atomically claims the article — only rows in draft or generated transition to publishing. Concurrent publish attempts are rejected.
3. Calls your CMS integration (or webhook) with the article payload.
4. On success, stores published_url, cms_post_id, and sets status to published.
5. On failure, reverts the claim so you can retry after fixing credentials or CMS errors.

• TitleThe article title.
• ContentFull article body as HTML (or markdown where the platform supports it).
• Meta descriptionSEO meta description / excerpt, where the platform has a field for it.

After the first publish, Rankealo keeps the CMS post ID. When you edit an article in the app — or when automated improvements re-optimize it from search performance — Rankealo sends an update to the same CMS record instead of creating a new post.

Webhook integrations receive update_articles with cms_post_id so your endpoint patches the correct row. See the webhook contract.

If an article is already published, a repeat publish request returns success with the existing URL and post ID — no duplicate post is created. If a publish is already in flight (publishing), new attempts are denied until the first completes or fails.

Slug collisions on some CMS platforms trigger automatic slug suffix retries before surfacing an error.