Review & Publish Your Post

When your content source finishes generating a new article, SyteOps sends a branded review email to everyone on the notification list and opens a secure editing portal where reviewers can read, refine, and approve the post before it goes live.

This page explains the full workflow from the moment that email arrives to the moment the post is published.

:::note Part of Content Pipelines The Review Portal is part of the Content Pipelines feature. It becomes available once you have at least one content source set up to deliver articles into your site — each incoming article opens as a draft in the secure editor for your team to review before it goes live. :::

Step 1: You receive a review email

As soon as a new draft arrives from your content source, SyteOps sends a notification email to:

The post's author (the WordPress user the post will be attributed to).
Anyone listed as a Default reviewer or Default CC reviewer in your Review Portal settings (see Who receives the review email below).

The email comes from your site, uses your site's logo, and includes a summary of the article title and source keyword. Two buttons sit directly under that summary, above the article photo: Edit/View this post (or Edit/View this page, named for what you were sent), which opens this particular draft, and a second button that opens your own private review page — labeled My Portal if you're a team member with a linked WordPress account, or See all my reviews otherwise. On a phone the two buttons stack one above the other so both stay readable and tappable.

The email follows your device's appearance setting, so it renders in dark mode if that is what you use. Your logo keeps a light backing so it stays legible either way.

The article photo is sent along with the message rather than linked from your site, so it appears even in mail apps that block or fail to load linked images. One trade-off comes with that: if you forward the email or reply to it, most mail apps do not carry the attached photo across, so the recipient of that forward sees a placeholder where the picture was. The article itself is unaffected — the Edit/View button still opens the full draft, photo included. Unusually large photos are still linked rather than attached, so a message never becomes needlessly heavy.

Click Edit/View this article in the email. Your browser opens the Review Portal — a page on your own WordPress site.

The link alone cannot publish or change anything. It simply takes you to the portal. To make any edits or approve the post, you must be signed in to your WordPress account.

If you are not already logged in, the portal shows its own branded sign-in card. Enter your usual WordPress username and password there and you are taken straight to the draft — you never leave the portal for the WordPress login screen. If your site owner has passkeys switched on, the card also offers a Sign in with a passkey button; a password still works either way.

If your site runs a security plugin that challenges a sign-in, the card tells you what to do next. On a site protected by Wordfence, the card passes Wordfence's invisible security check for you, so a normal sign-in needs no email. If Wordfence still wants to confirm it's you, the card says so, and the link in Wordfence's email brings you back to the draft after you sign in. If your account needs a two-factor code or a passkey, the card points you to the standard sign-in page, where you complete that step and then land on the draft as usual. Any other security check takes you to the standard WordPress sign-in screen so that plugin can tell you what it needs. The message about a wrong username or password only ever means exactly that.

The first time you open an article is recorded, so the site's owners can see the review email was acted on. Only that first open is listed — later visits add nothing — and nothing is recorded unless you are signed in with permission to edit that article.

:::tip After a plugin update, or after you replace a picture The review portal brings its own look and scripts. After you install a SyteOps update, reviewers see the new design and behavior the next time they open the portal — you do not have to purge a CDN. Replacing a picture works the same way: the portal shows the new file. Saving stores the original media URL rather than a CDN copy, so the replaced picture still shows after you reload, and it does not bake a cache-buster into the article. :::

Step 3: Review and edit the draft

Once you are signed in, the portal shows the full draft. The header brand (logo and company name) opens the WordPress Dashboard in a new tab when you click it. In the article editor, the top bar uses two rows — logo and status pill on the first row (status on the far right, with a small ID chip such as #1234 just to its left that names the post or page number, for example when you tell a teammate which item you mean), nav pills under the logo and Signed in as on the right of the second — so logos and names are not squeezed on narrow screens. My Portal in that bar opens your own private page without leaving the portal session. An account with no linked team-member record sees See all my reviews there instead, which opens the review queue.

You can edit the core article fields as well as the SEO details, AI visibility settings, and categories and tags.

On a wide screen the article sits on the left with the review panels beside it. On a phone or a smaller tablet the two columns stack, and the title and article come first — feedback, reviewers, SEO, GEO and categories follow underneath, so you can start reading straight away.

Tables and other formatting in the article body are shown the way they will look once published, so you can judge the article as your readers will see it.

The cards beside the article or preview (Featured Image, Feedback, Reviewers, SEO and the rest) stay in place while they fit next to it. With Pack cards into gaps off (see below), the first card that would run past the bottom of the preview, and every card after it, moves underneath at full width, in two or three columns. The Feedback card, and every card above it (such as Featured Image, pictures, Author and the permission note), always stays beside the preview. On a narrow screen the layout is a single column and nothing moves.

The cards underneath use the whole width. A single card spans the page, two or three share it, and when the last row is not full its last card stretches across the space left. A card that ends up wide lays its contents out across too: GEO questions sit side by side, and the SEO fields sit next to each other instead of each running the full width. When GEO or Reviewers is underneath with other cards, it gets a full-width row of its own after them, so its questions or people spread across instead of running down a narrow column.

When cards have moved underneath, a Below the article card (Below the preview on a page review) appears at the bottom of the sidebar. It lists those cards by name, such as GEO · SEO, with a small down arrow. Select it to jump to the cards underneath, or select a name to jump straight to that card. It only appears on wide screens, while there is something underneath. The arrow bounces a few times and then stops, and stays still if your device is set to reduce motion.

When there are many notes, the Feedback list scrolls inside its card (on screens wider than 920px), so the card stays about the height of the window instead of growing with every note.

Once you have scrolled so far down that the preview is completely out of view, a Back to preview button (Back to article when you are editing an article) appears at the bottom right. Select it to return to the top of the preview.

Pack cards into gaps

With Pack cards into gaps on (Content Pipelines, Review Portal settings, Review and approval rules card; on by default), the cards fill the empty space instead of leaving holes:

Beside the preview, a card that is too tall for the space left is passed over for the next card that fits, so one tall card no longer pushes every other card underneath.
Under the preview, each card goes into whichever column is shortest, so a tall card no longer leaves holes beside it.

Cards are placed in this order of priority, as far as space allows:

View	Order
Editing	Reviewers, SEO, Categories & Tags, GEO, Links, AI agent prompts, FAQ prompt
Client (comment only)	Reviewers, AI agent prompts, FAQ prompt

Feedback, and every card above it, always stays beside the preview. A card that is not in the list comes after the listed ones. Filling a gap comes first: a lower card takes a space that no higher card fits.

There is a separate switch for the editing view and for the client view, which shows fewer cards. A card you are typing in, or that has a menu open, is never moved; the layout catches up once you leave it. Turn a switch off to keep the cards in their page order, as before.

Review how it looks on the site

Some reviews open as they will look on your live site, instead of as a body you type into. That is how a page is reviewed, and it is also how an article opens when you choose Review Appearance.

The preview is a private full-page view (no WordPress admin bar). Like the portal, it only opens for someone signed in who is on that review, or an administrator, so a forwarded preview link does not show the draft to anyone else. The toolbar is Device Preview (Desktop / Tablet / Mobile), then Height (Auto / 800 / 1200 / Full), then Reload latest. Height Auto matches the page content; Tablet and Mobile sit centered.

To open quickly, the preview is shown from a private saved copy of the page, made for you alone. When it is, Saved copy from and the time the copy was made appear beside Reload latest. The copy is replaced automatically when pages, pictures, menus, the theme, plugins or site settings change, and is never kept for more than about 10 hours. A change the site cannot announce (for example, a file edited directly on the server) shows after you select Reload latest. Select Reload latest to see the newest version right away; it also replaces the saved copy. The preview reloads the newest version on its own after you swap a picture or change its details in the portal. If the preview cannot load inside the portal, you will see couldn't embed this preview and an Open in a new tab link.

The toolbar and the preview beneath it are framed in one color, with a small label inside the toolbar, so you always know what you are looking at: green Live means visitors can already see this page exactly as previewed, amber Draft preview or Scheduled means only reviewers can see it, and gray Private covers anything else. Switching between pages in a bundle, or publishing or unpublishing an article, updates the frame and label to match.

Saving from this view never changes the page or article body. Title, summary, and the other review fields still save as usual.

Click a page element in the preview to leave a note. Controls that work within the page still work: accordions, tabs, buttons and links that jump to another spot on the same page open, switch or scroll as they would on the live site. Links that would take you to another page, open a new tab or submit a form do not follow; clicking one opens a note dialog instead. To leave a note on an accordion title, a tab or a button, hold Shift while you click it. A note placed inside a closed tab, slide or menu shows Not showing until that part of the page is open; opening it makes the pin appear, and the locate button on the note opens the tab or section for you. A key at the top of the preview lists these clicks; the picture shortcut below appears in it only if you can change pictures on that page, which needs the Modify with AI and image libraries permission (see Editing permissions). Drag across words first if you want the note to quote that phrase; a click with nothing selected still comments on the whole element. Hold Cmd (Mac) or Ctrl (Windows) and click a picture to open the same image tools as Content Review and swap it into the page; use Undo picture swap in the toolbar to reverse the last swap. In that panel, edit Alt Text and Caption and press Apply to save them on the page right away; the preview reloads, and the same Undo picture swap button reverses the last alt text or caption change too. A page has no image link box, because a picture is replaced with Media Library or Stock Photos. A few things differ by picture: on the page's featured picture, Apply also saves the alt text and caption to the picture in your media library (the same record the article view edits), on a picture built in Elementor, Apply saves the caption but not the alt text, and the status line says so, and some layouts (a cover or background picture, or a picture inside a media-and-text block for its caption) have no place for an alt text or caption, in which case that part is skipped and the status line says so. Only the boxes you changed are saved, and if you or someone else edits the same text again afterward, Undo picture swap stops and tells you instead of overwriting it. Undo of a swap also stops when the picture you swapped in was already on the page before the swap, or another copy was added afterward, because it cannot tell which copies to put back. While a swap, an Apply or an Undo is running, the others wait and their buttons are off until it finishes. Press Escape to drop the highlight and close the note. Clicking an image shows that it is an image, its name, and a small thumbnail. A pin on the preview and its Feedback row share the same color, and a pin grows when you point at it so it is easy to click. To leave another note on an element that already has a pin, hold Shift and click the pin. If that element has moved, the row is marked Moved rather than guessed. Handling or deleting a note in Feedback updates the pin on the preview at the same time — you do not need to refresh. To see where a note was left, press the small crosshair in the left column of the note's Feedback row, between the author's initials and the trash icon (Show this spot on the page): the page scrolls to the spot, the element flashes and its pin bounces in a bright pink that no note color uses. If you have reduced motion turned on, the element is outlined for two seconds instead and the pin does not bounce. Press the crosshair again, or Escape while it is selected, to jump back to the note. A note marked Moved has the crosshair dimmed, and pressing it tells you the spot is no longer on the page; if the spot is inside something hidden right now, such as a closed tab, it says the spot is hidden. The crosshair appears on page reviews, on a post's Appearance view and on bundle entries that show the page preview; the plain article view lists the same notes without it.

You can also send one review link for several pages or posts. Under Content Pipelines → Page Bundles, name the bundle, add an optional note for reviewers (line breaks are kept in the email), then build the list in two panels. The Library on the left has a Posts tab and a Pages tab, each showing how many it holds; search by title, tick the ones you want (or tick Select all shown) and press Add selected to add them all at once, in the order they are listed. Items already in the bundle are marked Added, and a bundle holds 20 at most: if you tick more than fit, the ones that fit are added and the message says how many were not. In this bundle on the right shows numbered cards in the order reviewers will walk them; drag an item by its handle to reorder it (or focus the handle, press Space or Enter, use the arrow keys and press Space or Enter again to drop; Escape cancels), and use the cross to remove one. After you change the order, press Save bundle to keep it. Pick the reviewers from the row of checkboxes, then Save bundle. Each person you select sees those pages on My Portal, including pages that are already published. The bundle list names each page and links it to that page's review. Send bundle emails those reviewers in the same layout as the other review messages: a short heading, that note labeled with the sender's first and last name, then each page's name in one card, and every one of those links opens that page's own review; See all my reviews on that mail opens your private review page filtered to the bundle, on its Pages view. On your review page, bundled items are grouped under each bundle's name. Click a card in In this bundle to select it, then Send page emails that one page or post as a page review without saving it into a bundle. Copy link copies the same walk link without emailing anyone. The reviewer opens a single link and uses the strip above the preview to move to the next or previous item. Comments stay on the item they are looking at.

A copied link is for looking at the site and leaving notes. The people on it can leave notes, reply to them and delete their own, but they cannot edit or publish anything — see Commenting on someone else's review. Send bundle is what gives the listed reviewers their usual editing rights on those items. The pages still show on each selected person's My Portal as soon as the bundle is saved.

AI agent prompts. On a page or appearance review, a card in the sidebar carries the "AI agent prompts" Admins badge. It turns the notes on this page into one copyable prompt for a coding agent to implement — each selected note becomes a task naming where it is on the page, what kind of change it is, the client's words verbatim, and how to check the change is done. Tick the notes to include (unresolved and updated notes are ticked for you), adjust the task type if needed, choose how much freedom the coding session gets, then Generate and Copy (or Download .md) the result. The Approval menu has three modes, and the prompt tells the session which one binds it:

Propose only — the session lists every change it would make and writes nothing. Use it to see the plan first.
Approve each change (the default) — the session asks you before every single change. Nothing is saved until you say yes to that exact change.
Approved batch — you approve the whole list once and the session then applies the listed changes together, after taking a restore point. Anything not on the list, and any task marked as needing your approval first, still goes back to one-at-a-time approval. Approved batch is open to anyone you have given the AI agent prompts area to (it is hidden by default), and the person running the session still approves the list once.

An administrator can change which mode the menu starts on under Pipelines settings, in the Agent prompt card (Default approval mode); you can still pick a different mode each time you generate. A note that points at an element inside a shared template (a header, footer or reusable widget) shows a Template badge, because changing it changes every page that uses that template. Download .md saves the prompt as a Markdown file named after the page. Copy is always there beside the prompt, grayed out until there is something to copy; the last prompt you generated stays in the box (with a note of when and by whom) so you can come back and copy it again without regenerating. It only appears on page and appearance reviews — a plain article review has no pinned page for it to describe — and it is hidden by default: grant it under Editing permissions by setting the AI agent prompts area to Allow for a role or a specific person. Generating needs the Agent prompts AI area configured under AI Models; until then the button is disabled with a note explaining why.

FAQ prompt (headless sites). If your site's pages are built by a separate frontend, a smaller FAQ prompt card appears under the AI agent prompts card. Generate builds a task for your coding session to show this page's reviewed FAQ, both as a visible section and as FAQ structured data. It only works once the page's FAQ has been reviewed in SyteOps, and only for a page your site would publish (published, not password protected, not opted out, and a content type your GEO settings cover); otherwise it tells you why not. The session is told not to change the FAQ wording: edit it in SyteOps, review it again, then generate a new prompt. Use Copy or Download .md to hand it over. No AI is used, so it costs nothing.

Core article fields

Field	What it is
Title	The post headline that appears on your site.
Body	The full article content.
Web address (slug)	The URL path for the post (e.g. `your-site.com/your-slug`). It sits in a slim strip directly under the title, above the article or the page preview, on both the Content and Appearance views.
Summary (excerpt)	A short description used in search results and social sharing previews.

Formatting and links

The body editor has a formatting toolbar for bold, italic, underline and strikethrough, headings (H2/H3), bulleted and numbered lists, and clear formatting (removes styling from the selected text).

When content AI is set up for your site, the same bar also has Remix with AI (it reads AI). Select part of the article first — a sentence, a paragraph, a heading, a list, or a table — and the dialog offers Selection (checked by default) or Whole article; with nothing selected, or the cursor just blinking somewhere, only the whole article can be rewritten. Selecting only part of a paragraph, a list item, or a table cell still rewrites the whole paragraph, list, or table it sits in — a remix never leaves half a list or half a table behind. The dialog names the provider and model that will run the rewrite. The new words stay in the editor until you press Save. Undo remix puts the last body (or the part that was rewritten) back; Redo remix brings that remix back after an undo. The button is hidden on pages, appearance-only reviews, comment-only access, and for anyone whose Remix text with AI permission is Hide.

A very long article is refused before anything is sent, with the character limit named so you know why. If a rewrite would have dropped a picture, a link, a shortcode, or a whole table, it is refused instead of applied, and the message says what would have gone missing — checked against just the selected piece when you chose Selection, so a picture elsewhere in the article never blocks a small text fix. If your selection no longer matches the article by the time the rewrite comes back — because it was edited in another tab, say — you are told to select it again rather than having the wrong text replaced. Revert to pre-remix appears once you have remixed at least once and puts the article back exactly as it read right before that remix — including after you reload the page, unlike Undo remix, which only remembers what happened in the current browser tab.

The dialog also offers a row of instruction chips — Shorter, Longer, Simpler, More formal, More conversational, Fix grammar only — that fill in the instruction box with a ready-made sentence you can still edit before pressing Remix. Your administrator chooses which of these chips appear (see Remix presets); if none are turned on, the row is simply not there and you can still type your own instruction. Every remix you run is kept in a short list under the dialog (time, whether it covered the selection or the whole article, and what you asked for), so you can compare a few attempts and bring an earlier one back with Apply, or Discard one you don't want to keep. Up to six recent attempts are kept per article; the oldest drops off once you pass that.

A button lights up when the text you have selected already has that formatting — so you can tell at a glance whether a word is bold, and click the same button again to remove it. This works on text that arrived from your content source, not only on text you typed yourself, and it includes underlining that came from the original article's own styling rather than from this editor. You can take the underline off a whole sentence or just a few words of one, and off a link, without disturbing anything else about how those words look.

One case is deliberately left alone: where an entire paragraph is underlined as a block and you select only part of it, the underline stays, because removing it would mean splitting one paragraph into three. Select the whole paragraph and it comes off.

How much formatting is offered is set once for the site, under Content Pipelines → Review Portal → Formatting controls:

Setting	What the toolbar offers
Minimal	Bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, remove link, and clear formatting. Pasted pictures are kept at every level.
Editorial (default)	The above, plus links, bulleted and numbered lists, and H2/H3 headings
Full	The above, plus block quotes, inline code, superscript, subscript and text alignment

Choose Full if your articles routinely need code snippets or pull quotes. Choose Minimal if you would rather reviewers only correct emphasis and leave the structure alone — they can still remove a link that came in with the article, they just cannot add one.

Pasting from Word or Google Docs no longer brings that document's fonts, colors and spacing with it. The words, and the formatting your chosen level allows, come through; the rest is dropped. This affects only what you paste in — it never changes formatting that is already in the article.

To check that a link in the article goes where it should, hold Command (Mac) or Ctrl (Windows) and click it. The address opens in a new tab so you stay in the Review Portal. A regular click still lets you edit the linked words. That gesture does not change how the link is stored.

The link button (🔗) lets you add or edit a hyperlink, and the remove-link button (🔗✕) strips the link from selected text:

Select the words you want to turn into a link, or place your cursor inside an existing link.
Click the link button to open the link picker.
If your cursor is already in a link, the URL field is filled in and the button reads Update link. Changing the address updates that link; it does not nest a second one.
Type in the search box to find a page or post on your site — the Pages & posts list filters as you type, and shows your most recently published content when the box is empty. Click one to insert a link to it.
If your site uses LinkCentral to manage links, the LinkCentral links list below it filters the same way — click one to insert the managed link, so clicks are tracked and routed by LinkCentral. If LinkCentral is not connected on your site, this list tells you so instead of disappearing, and the search still finds your own pages and posts.
To link to any other web address, paste it into the URL field and click Insert link (or Update link).
Tick Open in a new tab if readers should leave your site in a new tab. Clearing it removes that setting from the link.
Check in the dialog tests whether that one address is live. It does not change the article.

If either list can't load, it shows a short message with a Retry link instead of showing nothing.

To remove a link, select the linked text and click the remove-link button.

If an operator has set Insert and edit links to View only for your reviewer type, the link and remove-link buttons stay visible but cannot be used. Command/Ctrl-click still opens a link to test it.

Featured Image

The Featured Image panel shows the image currently set for the post. Click the image — or the Edit image button below it — to open Image Details, the same panel you get by clicking a picture inside the article. From there you can:

See where the image comes from. The Image Link field carries a short hint underneath it — Paste a new link to replace this image. Image Details opens by itself, so the full sentence about the picture's status is visible right away — a library picture reads Already in your media library even when that address is a CDN copy of the file. Collapse the section yourself and the heading falls back to a short status at a glance instead: In your media library (with a check), Not in your media library, Hosted on this site, Embedded in the article, or Check the image link.
Replace it with a picture from somewhere else. Paste the new web address into the Image Link field and click Apply. SyteOps fetches the image, adds it to your media library, and sets it as the featured image — so the published article never depends on someone else's site keeping the file.
Replace it from your media library. Click Media Library (marked with a folder icon) to pick an image you already have, or upload a new one from your computer.
Describe it. The Alt Text and Caption fields are here too, each with a short hint underneath — Alt Text: Describes the image for screen readers and search engines; Caption: Stored with the image in your media library.
Remove it from the article. Remove from article clears the featured image. The file stays in your media library. You will be asked: This removes this image from the article. Are you sure?

The preview updates as soon as the new image is set. If your account cannot manage media on the site, the Edit image button is disabled and says why.

Unused pictures sits in the same sidebar, just after Featured Image. It lists files attached to this article that the body and featured image are not using. Removing one of those files removes the unused file, not a picture still showing in the article. A removed picture is not destroyed straight away: it leaves the media library but is kept for a holding period (30 days unless your site administrator chose another length), and it keeps working anywhere on the site that turns out to still show it. Until the period ends the card lists it under Recently removed, with the day it was removed and the days left, and Restore puts it back exactly as it was. When the period ends the picture is checked once more: if something uses it by then it is restored for you, otherwise it is deleted for good. If your administrator set the holding period to "Do not keep", Delete unused deletes at once and cannot be undone, and the card says so before you confirm; if that setting changes while your page is open, the card asks you again before anything is deleted for good. A removed picture that a remix filmstrip still lists is marked "Removed. Use in article brings it back." there, and choosing Use in article puts it back. If your public site is still showing a removed picture when its holding period ends, that counts as a use: the picture is restored for you instead of being deleted. If you may also work with picture versions (the Modify with AI permission), the same list shows versions removed from a picture's grid, labeled "A removed version" or "Version removed to make room"; their Restore puts them back with their picture's versions. Two limits to know about. A removed picture is kept in the WordPress trash. Deleting it there yourself (Media → Trash → Delete permanently or Empty Trash) ends its holding period at once. A database clean-up plugin's "delete trashed posts" tool is stopped from deleting kept pictures when it deletes through WordPress (WP-Sweep and Advanced Database Cleaner do), but WP-Optimize's "Clean all trashed posts" removes them straight from the database and cannot be stopped: the picture's record is gone, its files are left behind, and it can no longer be restored. While WP-Optimize is active the settings page and the Removed pictures list show a warning with the fix, which is one setting: untick "Clean all trashed posts" in WP-Optimize, or set it to keep at least as many weeks of data as the holding period (30 days is 5 weeks). No other change is needed, and there is no warning when the holding period is "Do not keep". If kept pictures are lost this way, the activity log says how many. Media offload and image optimizer plugins we checked (WP Offload Media, EWWW, ShortPixel, Smush) act only when a picture is finally deleted, not while it is kept. If the plugin is deactivated, kept pictures simply stay kept; if it is uninstalled, every kept picture is put back in the media library first. The card follows the Unused pictures permission: Allow shows it, Hide removes it. You still need permission to upload files, and the card only ever offers files you have permission to delete — a WordPress role that can upload media but not delete its own posts (a bare Subscriber, for example) will see the card empty even with the permission set to Allow. If that happens, ask your site administrator to grant the delete-posts capability, or use the Author role. A small Used badge on a picture means another post or page already shows it; hover it, Tab to it or tap it to see which ones. Before listing a picture the card also checks the places a page does not show directly: your slider plugins' pictures (Revolution Slider, Smart Slider 3 and LayerSlider), the Links manager, network settings on a multisite network, and your theme's own files, so a picture your theme names in a template or stylesheet is kept. It does not read other plugins' custom tables or plugin files, and it cannot see a file name a theme builds in code; your site administrator can add a table. When the card cannot confirm the list (the theme's files are too large or cannot be read, or a slider table cannot be read), it keeps every picture and says that the list could not be confirmed instead of showing an empty card. Sometimes the card cannot tell: the picture's number appears somewhere in the site's stored data (a setting, a user's or a category's data) and nothing says whether that number is the picture or just a number. Such a picture is listed in its own group, May still be in use, below the unused ones. It is not ticked, and the reason is shown beside it. The same group holds a picture your public site displayed in the last 90 days: its reason says the site displayed the picture recently, and an administrator also sees the date and the page. The reverse does not hold: a picture the site has not displayed is not unused for that reason alone, because pages served from a cache, and some images loaded through a CDN or a lazy-loading plugin, are not recorded. The line under the list counts the two apart, for example "2 unused pictures. 1 picture may still be in use." Only an administrator can delete one of these, because only an administrator is shown where the number was found: the administrator ticks the picture, presses Delete unused, and the card asks once, naming the reason again, and removes it only on Remove anyway (Cancel or the Escape key backs out). A picture removed this way is kept for the holding period like any other, and the question says so. When the period ends, the reasons the administrator confirmed no longer bring the picture back: it is deleted for good. It is restored instead only if a new reason has appeared since then (the site displaying the picture again after it was removed is one), or if something now clearly uses it; the question says "permanently" and the button reads Delete anyway only when the site does not keep removed pictures. For other reviewers the box cannot be ticked and the row says an administrator can remove it. If the site changed in the meantime and a picture you sent turns out to be one of these, it is not deleted; it comes back in that group. The card does not check when the page opens: press Check for unused pictures to run the check, and until you do Delete unused stays unavailable. If the check fails, Try again runs it again. A very large site is checked within a time limit; when it runs out the card says how many pictures are "not checked yet" (they are kept, never offered for deletion) and Check the rest checks them and adds what it finds to the list. If a very large site cannot be checked even in smaller steps, the card says so and keeps those pictures; your site administrator can allow more time (the developer documentation names the setting).

Always keep. Some pictures are used somewhere the site cannot look: an email service's template, an ad, another website, a print file. The check cannot know about them, so it may call them unused. Each picture in the Unused pictures card, in either group, has a small Keep button (its full name is "Always keep" plus the picture's name), separate from the picture's tick box. Press it and the picture leaves the list, a line says it is kept, and Undo puts it back where it was until the card is next refreshed. A kept picture is never removed by anything automatic or in bulk: Delete unused will not offer it, Delete on a remix variant refuses it and says it is marked to always keep, and the storage limit on remix variants skips it and takes the next oldest picture instead. Pressing Check for unused pictures also fills in Kept pictures, a list of this article's kept pictures with who kept each one and on what day. Stop keeping on a row ends it, and the card checks again so the picture is treated like any other. Anyone who can use the card can keep or stop keeping a picture. An administrator the card is closed to still sees a Kept pictures card with Stop keeping, but cannot keep or delete pictures from it. A kept picture that no article on the site lists any more can only be cleared from a site-wide list that is not available yet. Each keep and each stop is recorded in the article's activity. Always keep does not stop you deleting a picture by hand from the media library.

Click the thumbnail on a Feedback note to open Image Details for that picture, the same panel you get by clicking the picture in the article. If a remix of that picture is now in the article, the panel opens on the remix so you can keep editing it. If the picture has been removed entirely, the panel still opens on the original stored picture and its notes, but Alt Text, Caption, Generate SEO with AI, and Attach reference image stay hidden until that picture is back in the article. Thumbnails in Send These Notes to Someone do not open that panel — they stay with the note you are choosing to include.

Show resolved. Once at least one note is resolved, the Feedback card header carries a Show resolved (n) switch, where n is the number of resolved notes. Turn it off to hide every resolved note, along with the replies under it, and to stop showing its marker on the page preview; turn it on to see them again. Resolved notes are only hidden, so the unresolved-notes warning when you publish still counts exactly what it did. The switch is on by default, and your choice is remembered in this browser only. If you open a link that points at a resolved note while they are hidden, that note is shown for the visit without changing your choice.

Delete All Comments. Administrators see a Delete All Comments button at the bottom of the Feedback card whenever the page or post has at least one comment. It asks you to confirm, tells you how many comments will go, and says it removes everyone's comments, including replies, and cannot be undone; Cancel is the selected choice, and Escape also cancels. When you confirm, every comment on that page or post is removed, pins on the preview disappear, the AI agent prompt for those notes is cleared, and a line under the list says how many were deleted. If someone added comments after you opened the page, nothing is deleted: the new comments appear in the list first, and the confirmation reappears with the total now on screen so you can decide again. If the page cannot show every new comment, it closes the confirmation and asks you to reload the page before deleting. The same Delete All Comments button appears when you open an article from a shared bundle link. If anything goes wrong, nothing is removed, and if the connection drops before the answer arrives the page says it cannot tell and asks you to reload. A notification email is never sent for a comment or reply that was deleted before the email went out. Only WordPress administrators and SyteOps administrators see the button; everyone else can still delete their own comments one at a time.

Alt Text describes the image for screen readers and search engines. The Alt Text field below the preview is filled in with the current description — with a hint that it is read by screen readers, and shown when the picture cannot load — and you can edit it there without opening the details panel. It saves with the rest of your changes. If a featured image is set but has no alt text, you'll be prompted to add it before you can publish.

Two things worth knowing when you swap the image:

You'll be asked to write new alt text. The box still holds the description of the picture you are replacing, and publishing that against a different photo describes the wrong thing to anyone using a screen reader.
Alt Text and captions are shared. They belong to the image in your media library, not to this one article — so changing them changes how that picture is described everywhere it is used. SyteOps only saves them when you actually edit them, so simply opening an article never rewrites anything.

Author

The Author panel sits just under Featured Image. It lists the same WordPress users as the content source Default author picker. The field is labeled Post Author, with a hint that it is shown as the byline. Change who is credited on the article — the panel shows Unsaved changes underneath while autosave catches up, or click Save draft (or Save changes on a live article) at the bottom of the page to save it right away. The new author is added to the reviewer list so they can open the portal; the previous author stays on that list too. This does not rebuild who receives review emails.

If an operator has set Author to View only for your reviewer type, you can still see who is credited, but the list is disabled. The same happens when Who can publish is Author or designated approver only and you are a co-reviewer — only the credited author (and administrators) can change the byline, so a co-reviewer cannot assign themselves and then publish.

Images inside the article

Click any image in the article body — or the featured image — to open its panel. The panel title reads Article Image, or Featured Image when you opened the featured one. Notes on This Image comes first, because a note about the picture is what most people open the panel to write. If any note on that picture is still unresolved, the heading tells you how many.

Remove from article takes that picture out of the body (and drops its caption with it). The file stays in your media library. The same confirmation is used as for the featured image. This is not the stronger library-delete confirmation.

Generate New Image from Text (when SyteHero can create images from text) starts from a prompt only — no source photo. The result is not placed until you add it to the article or use it as featured.

Below the notes is Image Details, a section that opens by itself every time you click a picture — click its heading, or the chevron beside it, to collapse it if you would rather not see it, and the chevron turns to show whether the section is expanded. It holds three short fields — Image Link, Alt Text and Caption — each with its own gray hint line underneath explaining what it is for, in place of a dash-separated explanation. Collapse it for the picture you are looking at, and it opens again on the next one — the section defaults open on every picture rather than remembering that you closed it.

Nothing is hidden by this — Image Details is where the link, alt text and caption live, but it is open in front of you from the moment you click a picture. The alt text and the caption are still edited here and nowhere else, and they still save exactly as before. If you collapse the section and it later has something to say back about one of those fields — when it asks you to describe a replacement image, or while it reports how a change to the picture went — it opens itself again to say it. Even while the section is collapsed, its heading shows a short status at a glance — In your media library, Linked from another site, Hosted on this site, Embedded in the article, or Check the image link — and opening the section swaps in the full sentence, as before.

Many drafts arrive with their images still hosted by whatever tool wrote the article. That works, but only for as long as that other site keeps the file: if it is moved or deleted, the picture disappears from your article. Images in that situation are labeled "Linked from another site — not in your media library", and an Import to media library button appears next to the label. Click it to bring the file onto your own site; the picture is added to your media library with its alt text, and the article is pointed at your copy.

A picture that is already in your media library is labeled "Already in your media library", and Import to media library is hidden — even when Image Link shows a CDN copy of that file rather than the original media URL. Do not Import those; they are already yours. Saving stores the original media URL, so a picture you replaced still shows after you reload.

You can delete any picture in this panel from your media library — including the original, and including the one the article is showing. You are asked to confirm. When your site keeps removed pictures (the holding period, 30 days unless your administrator chose another length), the picture is removed but can be restored from its card until the period ends, and the question says for how many days; when the site does not keep them, the question says the delete cannot be undone. Before anything changes, the whole site is checked for another use of the same file: other articles, this article's own custom fields and excerpt, settings, comments, and anything you have changed but not yet saved. If it is in use, the delete is refused and nothing in the article changes: the picture stays in the article and in the library. If it is clear and the article is showing the picture, it is removed from the article (along with its caption and any empty frame left behind) and then deleted from the library. A picture can also be kept for the article's undo history, a text remix or a picture swap, until that record is replaced by a newer one.

You don't have to do this by hand for every image. When you publish, images that are still hosted elsewhere are copied across automatically, so a published article no longer depends on another site keeping the file.

Two things to know about that automatic copy. If an image cannot be fetched — the other site is down, or the address is wrong — publishing still goes ahead and that image stays as a link, so one unreachable picture never blocks your article. And a single publish copies up to 25 images; on an unusually picture-heavy article the rest are left for the next publish. Either way you are told afterwards, so you know which articles still have borrowed pictures in them.

Importing needs permission to add media to the site. If your account does not have it, the Import button does not appear and images are left exactly as they are.

Swapping a picture for one from your media library. Next to the image link is a Media Library button, which opens your media library so you can pick a different picture. This works for pictures inside the article as well as for the featured image. Picking one keeps the article properly linked to that library item — something pasting a link cannot do — and the picture brings its own alt text with it, since alt text describes the picture rather than the article.

In that window, a picture already in use somewhere on the site carries a Used badge with the number of places (a plus sign means at least that many). Select a picture and a Used on list appears at the top of the details column on the right: it names the posts and pages you can edit and counts the rest. On a phone, where that column is not shown, the same list is a short line beside the button at the bottom. Nothing pops up when you rest the pointer on a picture there; the window already selects a picture on a click, and the list belongs to the picture you selected. With a keyboard, move between pictures with the arrow keys; a screen reader reads the picture's uses after its name. The same badge and list appear in the window Use another picture opens.

A stock picture that is licensed for editorial use only carries a second, amber badge: Editorial. It means the picture is fine in an article and must not be used in an ad, on a landing page, or anywhere that suggests a brand endorses the site. Select the picture and the details column says License: Editorial use only with that sentence; on a phone the line at the bottom begins with Editorial use only. The same badge appears on a library picture in Stock Photos, on your cloud library's pictures, and on the versions under Modify with AI; click or tap the picture there to read what the license allows. A picture with a standard license, or with none recorded, shows no badge. A picture copied from your cloud library before licenses were recorded gains its badge once its folder has been opened in your cloud library and read from the cloud (a list kept from the last few minutes does not count; Refresh reads it again). A version made with Modify with AI follows the pictures it was made from: if any of them is editorial, the new version carries the badge as soon as it is ready. Versions made before this was added are marked in the background after the update, from the record of what each was made from; an older version whose only editorial picture was an attached reference or a Model photo cannot be found that way, so treat it as editorial.

Its caption is left exactly as you wrote it. A caption is your own words about the article, so it is never silently replaced; if it no longer suits the new picture, edit it yourself. The button appears only if your account has permission to add media to the site.

Reusing a picture from your fal library. When SyteHero is connected with a team key, a Stock Photos button sits beside Media Library. It opens a browser of your fal library: pictures already generated for this client — on any of their sites — so you can reuse one instead of paying to generate it again. Filter by collection, or search when no collection is selected (search and the collection filter cannot be combined, the same way SyteHero's own library browser works); scroll for more with Load more; click a picture to see it larger, then press Use. A picture that this site already holds carries a Used badge; click the picture, or Tab to its Use button, to see which of your posts and pages use it, and after you press Use the badge appears on that picture too. The picture is copied into this site's media library the same way a Media Library pick is applied — picking the same picture twice reuses the same copy rather than adding a second one. Video items in the library cannot be used here; only images. If the library cannot be reached — no key connected, the fal account does not have this feature, or fal is briefly unavailable — the message says why. Stock Photos appears only where Media Library does, under the same permissions. The Stock Photos browser and the cloud-folder browser below open right under those buttons, above Alt Text.

Picking a picture from your cloud folder. When your site has a cloud image library connected and switched on, a button named after that library (for example Client photos) sits beside Media Library in Image Details. It works for a picture in the article, for the featured image and for a picture on a page. It opens your shared folder: folders sit in a row on top and click a folder to go in; the pictures below show three rows at a time (or as many as fit in 60% of the screen height on a very short screen) and scroll on their own, so the folders, the folder path and Load more stay where they are while you scroll; Load more adds the next pictures without moving you. Two small buttons beside the refresh button switch the pictures between a grid and a list; the list shows a small picture, the full file name, its size in pixels, the Used badge and Use on each row, in the same space as the grid. The popover remembers your choice until you close the browser tab. Hover a picture to see it larger, and choose Use to copy it into your media library and put it in place. In the article, the picture's own description (alt text) replaces the old picture's description; if it has none, the box is cleared and you are asked to write one. A picture that was already copied in is reused instead of copied again, and a Used badge marks pictures already in use on the site; hover one to see which of your posts and pages use it. Pictures in a format the site cannot use are left out, and a line under the pictures says how many. Setup is described in Google Drive Integration. To look closer without a mouse, Tab to a picture's Use button and the larger picture appears (press Escape to close it); on a phone or tablet, tap the picture itself and tap it again, or anywhere else, to close it. The small pictures beside feedback notes, in the Notify window and under Unused pictures open the same larger preview when you Tab to them.

Choosing where a new picture is filed. Once you have opened Stock Photos at least once for this article, a File into dropdown appears in Modify with AI, listing the client's collections. Leave it on Site default to file a fresh generation the same way it always has been, or pick a specific collection to file that one generation somewhere else — the pick resets to Site default each time you open a different picture. It appears only once collections are known, and only where Stock Photos itself does.

Turning it off for one article. Next to the publish controls there is an Import images checkbox. It starts from your site's setting and applies to the article you are looking at, so you can leave one article's pictures where they are without changing anything for everyone else.

Putting the original links back. If an article's images were copied across and you would rather they were not, a Revert images button appears beside the publish controls. It points the pictures back at the addresses they came from. Nothing is deleted from your media library — the copies stay there, in case another article is using them. If someone has changed one of the images by hand since it was copied, that one is left alone and you are told, rather than having your change overwritten. Reverting a live article asks you to confirm first, since the published page will go back to loading its pictures from somewhere else. Reverting also switches Import images off for that article, so the next publish leaves the original links alone — turn it back on if you change your mind.

Modify with AI. When SyteHero is installed and ready, Modify with AI sits below the Image Details section in the image panel, and also on the featured-image card. Type a prompt (often pre-filled from the incoming article) — the same box also holds a Use another picture pill if you would rather start the remix from a different picture — and click Generate. Model and Quality now share one row at equal width, so the model name is never cut off; Strength, for the one model that uses it, wraps onto its own line below with a hint. Generating no longer swaps the picture in your article — it makes a new version and puts it in a grid of version cards for you to choose between. The original picture is kept so you can Revert. Generate with a blank prompt is refused. Each version in the strip under the picture carries a Used badge when it is in use anywhere on the site; click it to see where, in the preview that opens below the strip.

Telling the AI what the article is about. Under the prompt is a tickbox, Tell the AI what this article is about. Ticked, it sends the article's title and summary alongside your prompt, which is what lets an instruction like "make the text on the screen readable" produce text about the right subject rather than plausible-looking nonsense. It is off unless you tick it, and it applies only to the generation you are about to run — these models are editing your photograph rather than drawing a new picture, and extra description is not always wanted. The grid of versions still labels each picture with the prompt in your own words; the added context is never shown there as something you typed. This never runs when the article is ingested — only when a reviewer asks. An operator can hide Modify with AI from specific reviewer types in Reviewer editing permissions (the Modify with AI and image libraries column).

Changing an image with AI

The image panel also has a Modify with AI section, below Image Details: describe the change you want and press Generate. Pressing Generate makes a new version and leaves your article alone — you decide afterwards which version the article uses. The original is kept, so Revert always brings it back.

The prompt box and the reference-picture control now share one box. Click the Use another picture pill at the bottom of the box to remix from a different picture instead of the one you opened — once you pick one, the pill turns into a chip showing its thumbnail and AI reference: <file name>. A note beside the pill or chip says plainly that this only guides Generate below, and points you at Media Library in Image Details if you actually want to replace the picture. Click the × on the chip (its accessible name is Stop using a different source image) to drop it and go back to remixing the picture you opened.

Picking a picture here does nothing until you press Generate. If you have picked one and press Apply or close the panel some other way before generating with it, you are asked to confirm — pressing Apply or closing does not swap in the picture you picked, and confirming discards it. Once you have pressed Generate with it at least once, closing or applying no longer asks.

Create an original picture inspired by this one. A checkbox, right below Keep text and logos exactly as they are, offers a different kind of generate: instead of editing the picture you started from, the AI writes a description of its style, mood, colors and people, then paints a brand new picture from that description alone — the picture's own pixels are never sent to the image generator. It ticks itself the moment you attach a reference picture, and also starts ticked when you open a picture that already has a reference attached through Attach reference image on Notes on This Image (your site can turn this default off either way), and unticking it for one generation sticks — including across attaching or changing a Notes reference — until you close and reopen the panel. While it is ticked, Strength, Preserve and Model photos are not used — they edit the picture you started from, and this generates a new one instead — and the Model list switches to the same text-to-image models Generate New Image from Text offers. A version made this way is badged Original · inspired by <file name> in the grid of versions. This creates a new picture from a written description rather than editing the one you started from. It lowers the chance of reproducing someone else's picture, but it is not legal advice: make sure you have the right to use any picture you start from.

Using a Model

A Use a Model control appears in this same Modify with AI block — not under Generate SEO with AI — but only once your administrator has granted Model consent for at least one person on a Users card. With nobody consented, the control does not appear at all. Open it, pick the person, then check which of their photos to send with this generate. Nothing starts checked, and closing the popover forgets the checks. Some remix models take Model photos (up to a number the model list shows) and others are scene-only. You can send up to four Model photos with one generate — fewer when the remix model you picked takes fewer pictures. The limit follows the model as you switch, and any checks past a lower limit are cleared. The article picture (or Use another picture) stays the picture being edited and does not take a Model-photo slot; Model photos are extra references so the result can match that person.

The photo list only shows pictures that can actually be sent with the generate — other file types and pictures you do not have permission to see are left out. It shows every curated photo and the 24 newest tagged files. People without consent never appear in the person list either.

If you switch to a remix model that can only take one picture, the control stays visible and disabled with a reason, and any person you had chosen is cleared — pick them again once you switch back to a model that accepts Model photos.

If a person's photos fail to load, you are told so and asked to choose them again, rather than being left with a picker that looks stuck.

The new file is tagged with the person's current display name when it is created. Those tagged files show up on the Users cards. Promoting a tagged file into the curated set is an administrator action on the Users card — see Model photos.

Model photos reach the image service only when SyteHero on this site is a release that accepts extra reference photos — see SyteHero Integration.

Two things decide whether the picture comes back looking like itself:

Model. The list now names each model and says which ones keep text and logos. If a picture has words in it — a sign, a label, packaging — choose one of those. The others are better at reimagining a scene than at preserving one, and they are the reason text has come back garbled. Where your image service reports it, each option also ends with a price rating from $ (lowest cost) to $$$$ (highest), so you can weigh quality against cost before you generate.
Keep text and logos exactly as they are. On by default. Turn it off only when you want a genuine reinterpretation rather than an edit.

Model and Quality now share one row at equal width, so the model name is never cut off. Quality is Standard, High or Ultra; several of the models that best preserve text ignore it entirely — they always return their own size — so it applies mainly to the more generative ones. Strength, for the one model that actually uses it, wraps onto its own line below Model and Quality, with its own hint. Generate (with a sparkle icon), Revert and Stop sit together on their own row below both checkboxes on this panel — this one and Tell the AI what this article is about above — with Generate filling the row.

The picture also keeps its own proportions. A square or portrait photo used to come back cropped to widescreen, because nothing told the image service what shape it started as.

The new version also keeps the original picture's title, alt text, caption and description, rather than arriving in your media library with a made-up name and nothing written about it. The one exception: if the original's title is nothing more than its file name — something like IMG_4471 — that isn't carried over, since a file name isn't a title anyone chose. This looks past the file names WordPress makes up on your behalf, too: when a name is already taken it adds a number, it saves a smaller copy of a very large photo, it turns a sideways photo the right way up, and it saves a separate copy when you crop. A picture still titled IMG_4471 is recognized in all of those cases. When the title is refused this way, the new version is named after the original's alt text instead, or after the article if there is no alt text. If the article has no title of its own either, there is nothing left to borrow, and the picture keeps its generated name. The file itself still gets a generated name on your server either way; it's the title, alt text, caption and description shown in the media library that come from the original.

Your site administrator sets the defaults under Content Pipelines → AI Models → Image generation; each Generate can override them. The Create an original picture by default checkbox — whether attaching a reference picture ticks Create an original picture inspired by this one for you — lives in the same Review Portal → Modify images with AI settings, right after Preserve detail.

How much credit is left. At the end of the Modify with AI heading row sits a small pill showing the image service's remaining balance, with a Refresh icon button built into it — its hover title reads Refresh, and screen readers still hear it as Refresh image AI credit. With one image provider configured, the pill reads simply as an amount, something like $30.01 credit, and the provider's name appears only when you hover the pill; with two or more providers, each keeps its own name in the pill, for example fal: $30.01 · other: $5.00. It is the same figure your site administrator sees in the plugin information panel, which opens from the logo in the top corner of the settings screen — the image services are listed there rather than on the API Keys screen, because they bill through a key this plugin does not hold. It lets you tell whether there is credit to spend before you press Generate, rather than finding out from a generation that fails. Refresh re-checks every image service at once, and hovering the pill still tells you when it was last checked (Checked N minutes ago). If a balance cannot be read, you are told why instead of being shown a misleading $0.00 — a zero would read as an empty account rather than a lookup that did not work. The balance appears only when Modify with AI is available to you.

This month's spend. Under the credit pill, when your image service reports it, a line reads something like This month: $12.50 (fal list price) — the total spent generating and remixing pictures on this site so far this month, at the image service's own list price. If some of that total is an estimate rather than an exact figure, the line says fal prices & estimates instead, so you never read an estimated total as more precise than it is. Once the image service confirms the actual billed charge for the month, the label instead reads fal billed (or fal billed + list prices when only some of it is confirmed yet), and, if your account's team-wide usage is readable, a trailing fal team total this month: $X names the whole team's spend alongside this site's own. This line appears only where the credit pill does.

While it runs. A progress bar appears under the controls. Some models report how far along they are, and the bar fills to match — it deliberately sits near the end for a while, because that is where the image service holds a job it has not quite finished. Many models say nothing at all while they work, and for those the bar shows a moving sliver rather than a percentage: the job is running, but there is no honest number to put on it. It no longer sits frozen at zero, which used to look like a picture that was never going to arrive. A Stop button sits beside Generate while a picture is being made; pressing it abandons the job and gives the controls straight back. (Apply and Cancel now sit together in a footer bar pinned to the bottom of the panel, so both stay reachable however far the popover scrolls; Cancel still just closes the panel.)

If it goes wrong, you are told why. A refusal now shows the image service's own words — a prompt it would not accept, a picture it could not read, a request that timed out — instead of a single "could not modify this image" for every possible cause. Where the reason has a fix you can act on yourself, such as a permission you do not have, you still get the plain-language version.

If somebody else is already changing that picture, you are told so, shown how far along their job is, and offered Stop — so you are not left waiting out a job you cannot see.

What that generation cost. When your image service reports it, the "New version ready" message also says what that particular generation cost — something like This cost $0.025 · fal list price, or, when the figure is an estimate rather than an exact one, est. $0.04. Once the image service confirms the actual billed charge for that generation, it instead reads This cost $0.025 · billed by fal. If the image service does not report a cost for that generation, nothing is added — you are never shown a made-up figure.

Choosing between versions

Every time you press Generate you get another version of that picture, and they all stay. They appear as a grid of version cards at the top of Modify with AI, each an equal size with a larger thumbnail than before: the picture the article arrived with first, then each version you have made, in the order you made them. The original's thumbnail carries the Original label. The grid appears once there is more than one picture to choose between — with a single picture there is no choice to make, so nothing is shown.

Click a card's thumbnail to see that version at full size, with the prompt that produced it underneath — big enough to judge whether it actually fixed what you asked for, which a small thumbnail cannot tell you. When your image service has a cost on record for that version, it appears under the prompt too. Click the same thumbnail again to close it. Clicking is only looking: nothing is written and your article does not change.

Up to three controls sit on each card.

Use in article — formerly labeled Put in article — puts that version into the article. It is the only thing that changes the picture your readers will see, and you can press it as often as you like — including on the original, to put things back exactly as they were. The one version you cannot put in the article is the one the article is already showing: instead of the button, that card shows In use with a check, and asking for it anyway is refused rather than quietly recorded as a change nobody made.
Keep (now with a bookmark icon) marks a version worth holding on to, and pressing it again releases it — the button reads Kept while it is on. Versions you have not kept are tidied away on your behalf once a picture's grid has grown past seven cards — the picture the article arrived with, plus six versions — oldest first, so a long session of experimenting does not fill your media library. A version you have kept is never tidied away, and neither is the newest one — the picture you just asked for is always still there when you look at it. A version tidied away is not destroyed at once when your site keeps removed pictures: it stays on its card, marked removed, and can be restored like one you removed yourself (below).
Delete is a trash-icon button (its accessible name is Delete this version) on every card, including the original and the one the article is showing. It removes that picture from your media library. If the article is showing it, it is taken out of the article first, and the confirm says so. Any notes left on that version move to the picture your article is showing, so a note never outlives the picture it is about.
Restore appears on a version that was removed (by you, a colleague, or the automatic tidy-up) while your site still keeps it. The card reads "Removed. Restore until" and the last day; it no longer counts toward the seven cards. Restore puts the version back in the grid where it was, with its prompt, and back in your media library. It does not put the picture back into the article (restore it first, then press Use in article), and notes that moved to another picture when it was removed stay where they are. A restored version is left alone by the automatic tidy-up for a week, even if the grid is full; that happens once per version, so press Keep to hold on to it for good. After the last day the version is checked once more and deleted for good unless something uses it by then, in which case it comes back on its own. If your site does not keep removed pictures, Delete is permanent and the confirm says so; if that setting changed while your page was open, you are asked again before anything is deleted for good.

Use in article never deletes a file. It only changes which picture the article shows. To remove a version from your media library, use the trash icon on that card.

Some versions carry fewer than three controls, because some of them are refused on purpose. A picture another article is also using is never deleted from the library. The version your article is currently showing can be deleted: it is removed from this article first.

Two more refusals apply to Delete, because they are about you and about this moment rather than about the picture:

nothing is deleted at all if your account is not allowed to delete media on this site;
and a picture a remix is still running on is left alone — wait for that to finish.

Whenever Delete is refused, you are told which of those applies rather than simply being refused.

If a version has already been removed from your media library some other way — from the Media Library screen, say, while your grid was open — pressing Delete on it simply tidies it out of the grid instead of failing.

If you would rather not choose between versions at all, Restore original puts the original picture back in one click — while that file is still in the grid. Once it has been deleted, the button is hidden.

Notes on an image

Click any picture in the article — or the featured image — and Notes on This Image is the first thing in the panel. Type what is wrong with the picture and click Save note. Under Save note, on every one of those panels, is Attach reference image, so later Modify with AI remixes start from that tagged picture unless you pick a one-off source for a single generate. If the picture is still only a web address and has not been imported into your media library, Pick stays disabled and a highlighted note next to it explains why, with a Go to Import link that jumps straight to the import button. If the picture is no longer in the article, Attach reference image is hidden.

The heading carries a count of the notes on that picture nobody has resolved yet, so you can tell at a glance whether a picture still has something outstanding without reading the list. A picture with nothing outstanding says nothing.

Saving a note emails nobody right away. The note is attached to that picture and everyone who can open the article sees it. After a short wait — the batch window — the article's author and reviewers who have not been told about it get it by email, in the same email as their other review updates, so a whole session of notes arrives as one message. You are never emailed about your own note. A note you want to reach somebody now still goes through Notify — see Sending the notes to somebody. In the Feedback list — and in the Notify picker — a note on a picture shows a small thumbnail next to the filename so you can tell which image it belongs to. Click that thumbnail in the Feedback list to open Image Details for the picture. If a remix of it is now in the article, that remix opens so you can keep editing it. If the picture is no longer in the article, the panel still opens on that original picture and its notes, without Alt Text, Caption, Generate SEO, or Attach reference. In Send These Notes to Someone, the thumbnail is part of the note row and does not open Image Details.

A note you have started is kept until you save it. Close the panel, or click a different picture, and the text is still waiting on that picture when you come back — the box says Unsaved note — press Save note while it is holding something, and your browser warns you before you leave the page with one outstanding. That warning applies after you publish too, because the notes panel keeps working on a live article. Nothing is saved on your behalf: a note is only filed when you press Save note.

A started note follows its picture. Import it, replace it, or change it with AI, and the text you were writing is still there against the new version — even if the change finishes after you have closed the panel. If the picture itself is removed from the article, the note goes with it and the page stops warning you about it. If two pictures end up pointing at the same file, their started notes are joined rather than one being thrown away, and the text that moved is introduced by a line saying it was carried over from another picture — so you can see what you are about to file before you press Save note.

When you want somebody to know straight away, use Notify in the action bar at the bottom of the portal — see Sending the notes to somebody below. A note Notify has already sent to someone is not sent to them again by the automatic email.

Each note has a Resolve link, in the image panel and again in the Feedback panel further down the page — so you can work through a list of notes without reopening every picture. Anyone can resolve a note, not just whoever wrote it — the person who fixes the picture is usually the one who knows it is handled. Resolved notes stay in the record, grayed out, and can be reopened from either place. Notes never block publishing.

Sending the notes to somebody

Notify sits in the action bar at the bottom of the portal, beside Request changes. It is an article-level action because it always was one: the email it sends covers every note on the whole article, not just the picture you happen to be looking at.

Click it, choose who you want us to notify, optionally type a message, and press Send. The dialog lists the notes that person has not been sent yet — open notes, replies, and notes already handled that they were never told about. A note they wrote themselves is never in that list — you are never offered someone's own note to send back to them. Every box starts checked; uncheck any you do not want in this email. A note you uncheck is also held back from that person's automatic email, so it will not reach them later behind your back — tick it in a later Notify when you do want them to have it. A reply whose author cleared Notify recipient via email? starts unchecked, marked Not emailed; check it if you do want to send it. That notes-list hint appears after you pick someone. Check all and Uncheck all above the list save you from clicking through them one at a time. If you uncheck every note and have not typed a message, Send disables with a reminder to pick at least one note or add a message — checking a box or starting to type clears it right away.

One email, to one person. If you work through six photos and then press Send, the recipient gets a single message listing the notes you left checked, not six messages. Nobody else is emailed — Notify is not a broadcast, and it does not touch the article. Nothing is saved, no schedule changes, and nothing is published.

Notify is a heads-up, not the only way anyone hears. Everyone already on the article — its author, the reviewers, and anyone watching it — is told about new notes on their own, automatically, after a short wait (see Batched emails). Choosing someone in Notify reaches them sooner, with a message of your own if you add one; it does not decide who else eventually hears about the notes.

If that person has more than one email address on file and only one of them could be reached, Send still reports success — they heard about it — and adds that not every address on file could be reached. The notes are marked as told either way, so pressing Send again for the same person does not repeat them.

The message is optional, in both directions. You can send the notes with no message at all, or send a message with no notes — a hand-off to a colleague at the end of your shift, for example.

Your message is kept with the article. It joins the Feedback panel as a note, so the next person to open the article can see the hand-off happened rather than having to take your word for it in an email they may not have.

The email tells them what changed, not just what is outstanding. It lists Notes currently open, Previously Resolved Notes, and — in their own section — any already-handled notes you chose to send that they had never heard about. Somebody who heard about three problems last week can see that two of them are now fixed, instead of receiving the same three again.

A note you have not saved is saved first. If the image panel still holds a note you were typing, Send files it so it goes out with the rest; if that save fails, nothing is sent and the modal says so. Notes you started on other pictures are not sent — only you can decide a note is finished — so the confirmation tells you how many are still waiting.

Who you can choose. The list offers the people already on this article, plus site administrators, who can already open every draft. Telling anybody else would also be giving them access to an unpublished draft, and that is what Send to a Colleague is for.

Nothing new to say? If that person has already been sent every note on the article, Send tells you so rather than mailing them a duplicate — add a message if you want to reach them anyway.

Your own name is not in the list, because Notify never emails the person sending. If the person you choose has turned Reply notifications off on their own page, or has no email address on file, Notify says that nothing was sent instead of asking you to try again. A message you typed is kept as a note on the article either way.

If your site administrator has turned reviewer-note emails off, the Notify button simply is not there; you can still write and resolve notes.

SEO — keyword and meta description

The SEO panel lets you control how the post appears in Google and other search engines.

SEO Title (shown only when your site has an SEO plugin connected — Squirrly SEO, Yoast SEO or Rank Math) — The search-result headline. The hint under the field is Shown in search results. Leave blank to use your SEO plugin's default title. What happens when you leave it alone depends on which plugin is connected, and the difference matters:
- Squirrly SEO — the title is auto-generated from the post title. Type your own to override it; clearing the field returns it to automatic.
- Yoast SEO or Rank Math — the field stays empty unless you type something, and that is correct. Both plugins build the title from your own site-wide template (usually something like Title | Site Name), and they use that template only while this field is blank. Filling it in automatically would quietly drop the site name from every article. Type a title here only when one specific article needs to differ; clearing it hands the article back to your template.
When no SEO plugin is connected, this field is hidden.
- Generate title — beside the field. It drafts a plain-text headline of about 60 characters, cut at a word boundary, using the Primary Keyword when one is set. It fills only this field.
Primary Keyword — The main search phrase this article is targeting. Your content source pre-fills this from the keyword used to generate the post. You can change it at any time.
Secondary Keywords — Supporting search phrases for the article, pre-filled from your content source when provided. Enter them comma-separated. They are saved with the post and available to your SEO tools.
Generate keywords — beside the keyword fields. It fills the Primary Keyword and the Secondary Keywords (up to six phrases in all, without repeats) from the article. Existing values in those two fields are replaced, and nothing else changes.
Description — The short sentence that appears under the page title in search results. The box shows the description your SEO plugin holds for the page, so you see what search results carry even when the excerpt is empty; with no SEO plugin, or no description set there yet, it shows the excerpt. Changing it updates the search description, and also the page excerpt when the excerpt was the same text; an excerpt that was different is left alone, and with an SEO plugin connected an empty excerpt stays empty. Emptying the box never clears the search description. Saving without touching the box changes nothing. Keep it to one or two clear sentences that summarize the article. Generate description (beside the box) drafts one from the article, using the Primary Keyword when one is set, for you to review and edit. (This requires a Content provider to be configured in the Review Portal settings.) Each Generate button makes one AI request and fills only its own field or fields. Generated text replaces what is in the field, and the search-result preview updates at once. On a draft, generated text is autosaved like any edit; on a published post it's kept only when you save. If the AI is not configured or its reply cannot be read, the error shows under that button only. Each person can press the Generate buttons up to 40 times an hour and 200 times a day, all three together; past that, the button asks you to try again in a few minutes.
Review Photo AI — Beside the description sits its own button for the article's pictures, shown once an Image SEO provider and model are configured (with the provider and model named underneath). Click it to open the same photo picker the AI buttons above offer after they run — see Describing a picture for search later in this guide — without first generating a meta description. It never touches the description field; describing photos is a separate AI call from writing the description.
Google index status (published pages, for people who can publish them, once Search Console is connected) — A line under the search-result preview says whether Google has indexed the page, for example Google: Indexed (last crawled October 3, 2026) or Google: Not indexed: Discovered - currently not indexed. Check now asks Google again (once a minute at most). Without a connection, a SyteOps Admin sees Search Console isn't connected. and other publishers see nothing. Setup and every message: Google index status.

Each of the Links, Author, SEO, GEO and Categories & Tags panels shows its own Saved / Unsaved changes line at the foot of the panel, so you can see at a glance whether what you just changed there has been kept. The portal saves on its own a few seconds after you stop typing — and immediately after any of the AI buttons fills something in — so generated text is never left sitting only in your browser; you can also click Save draft (or Save changes on a live article) at the bottom of the page at any time, which saves everything on the page, not just one panel.

As you type, a search-result preview updates in real time so you can see exactly how the title and meta description will look to someone finding your post on Google before you publish. When an SEO title is set, the preview uses it as the headline. Your SEO plugin (Squirrly SEO, Yoast SEO or Rank Math) can store placeholders such as the page number, site name and separator in these boxes. The boxes keep them as stored, and the preview shows the finished text as that plugin fills it in, including what it uses for an empty field, so it reads the same as the search result. Text you type is previewed a moment after you pause. If the plugin cannot fill something in, the preview shows the text as typed. Reviewers who cannot edit the post itself can use the common placeholders (title, separator, site name, page number, dates, category and similar) and plain text, including percent signs such as "50% off" or "65%-75% LTV". A range like "65%-75%" saves exactly as you typed it, but Squirrly SEO and Rank Math read the "%-75%" in the middle as one of their placeholders and leave it out of what search engines see, so the live description would read "Up to 65 LTV." (Yoast SEO leaves it alone). The preview shows that result, and a note under the box tells you what will be dropped. Write the range as "65–75%" or "65% to 75%" and the whole thing comes through. Other placeholders read other data on the site (custom fields, custom taxonomies, author details), so only someone who can edit the post, or your SEO plugin's own editor, can add them. For everyone else they show as typed in the preview, and a save, publish or request for changes that adds one to the SEO title, description, keyword or post title is refused with a message saying so.

GEO — AI search and answer engine visibility

The GEO panel helps you understand how well your article is positioned for AI-powered search tools — such as those that read your site and use the content to answer user questions directly. The heading is GEO; the hint under it is Generative Engine Optimization.

Checking your AI readiness score

Click Analyze GEO to run an AI analysis of the post. Within a few seconds the panel shows:

A readiness score indicating how well the article is structured to be picked up and cited by AI answer engines.
A list of the questions your article answers — these are the kinds of questions an AI search tool might recognize your article as a source for.

You can run the analysis as many times as you like; it does not change the article itself. The score and the questions are stored as soon as the analysis finishes, and re-running never discards answers you have edited yourself. If you turn on Analyze GEO automatically on the Review Portal settings, that same analysis also runs when a new article first arrives and again a few minutes after its text changes, so reviewers do not have to click the button for every new or edited draft. It is off by default.

Running the analysis writes an answer for each question. Answers are shown in full in this panel (up to 2000 characters) and are never cut off. They stay held back from your answer-engine surfaces until a reviewer ticks I have reviewed these answers, which sits under Pillar Article (Cornerstone). On a site where AI Answers Reviewed is required before publishing, that checkbox sits in a Required to publish box; where the requirement is switched off, the checkbox is still there but the box is not labeled required. If an answer already looks cut off from an earlier review, edit it or tap Draft answer again — re-running the analysis keeps your existing wording and will not replace it. See Publishing the questions your articles answer for the full walkthrough of what that switch does and where the answers get published.

AI answer feed toggle

The Include in llms.txt / AI Answer Feed toggle controls whether this specific post is listed in your site's AI content feed — the file that AI systems read to discover what your site covers.

The toggle is on by default for every published post, meaning all of your published content is included automatically.
Turn the toggle off if you want to keep a particular post out of the AI feed (for example, a time-sensitive or confidential article).

This setting is saved by autosave, or when you click Save draft (or Save changes) or Approve & Publish.

Pillar Article (Cornerstone)

Tick Pillar Article (Cornerstone) to mark this as one of the articles your site's authority rests on — the definitive guide on its topic, rather than a routine update.

Your AI files can only hold so much, and without this they simply keep whatever was published or edited most recently. Marking an article as a pillar changes that in three ways:

Its questions and answers are kept ahead of other articles' when the index has to choose which to publish.
When several of your articles answer the same question, the pillar is the one an AI tool is pointed to.
If your site uses LLMS Amplifier, the article is listed first in its index file, so it survives even when that list is trimmed.

If you have an SEO plugin connected, ticking this also marks the article there — cornerstone content in Squirrly SEO and Yoast SEO, pillar content in Rank Math — so you only have to say it once.

Use it sparingly. If everything is a pillar, nothing is — the point is to tell AI tools which handful of pages to trust first.

This setting is saved by autosave, or when you click Save draft (or Save changes) or Approve & Publish.

Links

The Links panel appears when your site uses LinkCentral and the article is in the editorial or full editor (not the minimal toolbar, and not a page preview). It sits under GEO.

Analyze scans the article you are looking at and lists suggested library and cross-article links. It does not change the article until you apply.
Cherry-pick by ticking the suggestions you want, then Apply selected, or use Apply all to take every suggestion from a fresh scan. A suggestion pointing to an address the article already links (including one you just applied) is skipped, and applying changes nothing in the article except the new links.
Check whether links are live (the Check button) tests the addresses already in the article, and any suggestions on the list. Live or dead is shown next to each one. Check does not change the article.

Cross-article suggestions use the categories and tags already saved on the post. Save first if you just changed them.

Linking options (how many cross-article links, keyword matching, and so on) start from your site's LinkCentral settings. Changing them here applies only to this scan; it does not rewrite those site settings.

If an operator has set Link suggestions to View only, you can see the panel but Analyze, Apply, and Check are disabled. Hide removes the panel. You can still insert or edit a single link from the toolbar unless Insert and edit links is also View only.

Categories and tags

The Categories & Tags panel shows the categories and tags that will be applied to the post when it is published. They appear as individual chips that you can manage directly in the portal.

Add a category or tag — Type into the field and press Enter, or click a suggestion to add it.
Remove a category or tag — Click the × on any chip to remove it.
Get fresh AI suggestions — Click Refresh to ask the AI for a new set of suggested categories and tags based on the current article content. The AI suggests one of your existing categories and up to six of your existing tags; it never suggests a new one. The suggestions are added beside the chips already there, so remove any category you no longer want — an article publishes with exactly one category. Clicking Refresh does not save anything automatically.

The final set of categories and tags is saved by autosave, or when you click Save draft (or Save changes) or Approve & Publish.

Saving your changes

Once you have finished reviewing all panels, choose one of the action buttons:

Save draft — Saves all your edits (including SEO, GEO settings, and categories/tags) and keeps the post as a draft. The portal stays open so you or a colleague can continue reviewing later. Saved appears next to the logo at the top of the page (beside the powered-by line when the header is cramped).
Approve & Publish — Saves all your edits and publishes the post to your site immediately. The portal first asks you to confirm. After you confirm, it shows a live progress list — checking the article is ready, copying images to this site if needed (with a count such as "3 of 12"), publishing, and sending the notification — until the work finishes. When it is done, you can close the dialog or open the live article. By default, the author, the reviewers and anyone watching the article receive an email confirming the post went live (site owners can turn this off — see the rules table below). If that email could not be sent, the notification step is marked as failed and the confirmation says so — the post is still published. When the site is going to try again by itself, the step says so too ("We will try again shortly."), so a message that is still on its way isn't reported as lost.
Schedule (if enabled by the site owner) — Check the Schedule box to pick a date and time, then click Approve & Schedule. The same confirm-then-progress dialog tracks the scheduling. A future time publishes automatically at the moment you chose. A past time publishes immediately and keeps that date as the post's publish date. Scheduling is not final — see Changing or cancelling a schedule below.
Request changes — Opens a short note prompt where you can describe what needs updating. Your current edits are saved to the draft, the author and co-reviewers are notified by email, and your note is added to the portal's Feedback panel. See Step 5 for the full walkthrough.
Notify — Sends this article's notes, and an optional message, to one person who already has the article. Unlike Request changes it saves nothing, changes no schedule and emails nobody else. See Sending the notes to somebody.

Setting a time without publishing yet

You do not have to approve a post to record when it should go out. Tick Schedule, pick a date and time, and click Save draft — the time is kept with the post, and it is still a draft. Open it again tomorrow and the time you chose is waiting in the field. A date in the past is kept the same way: Save draft does not snap it to now or drop it. If you later click Approve & Publish without changing that time, the article goes live and keeps the past date. Unticking Schedule before you publish still means live now, with today's date.

This matters when your site reserves publishing slots automatically. If the site's publishing cadence has already earmarked a moment for the article, the date field opens filled in with that reserved time. A time you set by hand replaces it — yours is what the post publishes at when it is approved. Clearing the box hands the article back to its reserved slot.

Because the time is a saved value like any other, it counts as an unsaved change: it autosaves while you work, and the portal warns you before you navigate away with it unsaved.

Recording a time is an edit, not an approval, so you can do it even if you are not allowed to publish. The post stays a draft until somebody with publish permission approves it. This works from the calendar too — drag your own draft onto a day and the calendar confirms it saved your preferred time rather than scheduling it. Moving an article that is already scheduled is different, and still needs publish permission: that changes when something already approved goes live.

On an article that is already live, the buttons are different: the main one reads Save changes, because there is nothing left to approve, and next to it sits Revert to draft for taking the article back off your site. See Taking a live article back to draft.

If you are allowed to publish, a Published date field sits with those buttons. Change it to a past or current time and click Save changes — the live article keeps that date and stays on your site. A future time is refused: a live article cannot be put back on the schedule. Reviewers who cannot publish do not see the field.

Changing or cancelling a schedule

A scheduled post is still yours right up until it publishes. Nothing about scheduling is one-way.

When you open a scheduled post, the portal shows you exactly where it stands:

The badge at the top reads Scheduled with the date and time it will go live.
A banner under it repeats the date and reminds you the schedule can still be changed.
The Schedule box is already ticked and the date field already filled in with the time you chose.
The main button reads Update schedule rather than Approve & Publish.

From there you can:

Keep editing. Save as often as you like — your changes are picked up automatically and the post still goes live at the scheduled time.
Move it. Change the date and time, then click Update schedule. The same confirm-then-progress dialog tracks the update.
Publish it now instead. Untick Schedule and click Approve & Publish. The portal will warn you first that this cancels the schedule and makes the post live immediately, then show progress while it publishes.
Cancel it. Click Unschedule. The post goes back to being a draft and will not publish until you schedule or publish it again. The date you had chosen is kept in the date field, so scheduling it again is one click away. Everyone who was emailed about the schedule gets an Unscheduled email naming who took it off the schedule and when it was going to publish, sent before that time arrives.

You can also cancel a schedule from the calendar — select the post and choose Unschedule in the picker.

A few related behaviors worth knowing:

Requesting changes cancels the schedule. If you send a scheduled post back to its author, it returns to a draft so it cannot publish itself while they are still working on it. The changes-requested email says the planned publish is cancelled and names its date, so its recipients do not get a second email about it; anyone else who was emailed about the schedule, such as a watcher, gets the Unscheduled email instead. If you do not have permission to cancel schedules and the post is about to publish, the portal will not accept the request at all — ask an approver rather than risk the post going out mid-rejection.
Cancelling needs publish permission. Stopping a post from going out is treated the same way as sending it out, so it follows the site's Who can publish setting. Reviewers who cannot publish will not see the Unschedule button, in the portal or on the calendar.
If the site owner turns scheduling off while a post is already scheduled, you can still Unschedule it — you just cannot move it to a different time. The post keeps its existing date until you cancel it or publish it.
A post publishes when its time arrives, even while you are editing. If you are still working on a post in the last minute before it is due, saving will publish it — its scheduled moment has come. The portal tells you when this happens and updates the badge, so you are never left looking at a "Scheduled" label on a post that is already live.
Publishing is not one-way either. If a post has already gone live — because its schedule ran out, or because someone published it by hand — you can still take it back to a draft. See Taking a live article back to draft.

Scheduled posts also stay in your review queue (See all my reviews), marked with a Scheduled label and their publication time — so you can always find one again even if your original email link has expired.

Before you can publish

To stop half-finished articles going live, Approve & Publish first checks that the article is actually ready. If anything is outstanding, a short list appears instead of publishing, and most items have a button that completes it there and then:

Requirement	What it means	Button
GEO Analysis	The article has never been analyzed for AI-engine readiness.	Analyze GEO
GEO Analysis Is Current	The article was edited after it was last analyzed, so the score is out of date. Formatting-only edits — bolding a word, re-wrapping a paragraph — do not count.	Re-analyze GEO
Description	The description is empty.	Generate description
Categories & Tags	The article needs exactly one real category (only "Uncategorized" does not count; your site's main category counts like any other) and at least one tag. The message names exactly which part is missing — no category yet, more than one category, or no tag.	Suggest categories & tags, plus Go to Categories & Tags
AI Answers Reviewed	Nobody has confirmed the AI-written questions and answers for this article. Until someone does, they are held back from your answer-engine surfaces.	Review the answers

Some items finish as soon as you click the button. Others — accepting a generated meta description, or choosing which suggested categories and tags to keep — hand back to you, and the list closes so you can make the choice. Once everything is clear, click Publish now and the article goes live.

Categories & Tags has its own route to the panel. A Go to Categories & Tags button sits beside Suggest categories & tags whenever you can edit that panel — click it and the checklist closes and takes you straight to the chips so you can fix it by hand. If Suggest categories & tags comes back with nothing, it now says why: the site has no existing categories or tags of that kind for the AI to choose from yet (it only ever picks from terms that already exist). Add one by hand in the Categories & Tags panel — or, if your Categories & Tags permission is set to existing terms only, ask a colleague with permission to create one first.

A requirement you cannot act on is normally skipped automatically — if you do not have permission to edit that panel, or if the site's AI provider is not set up, it will never block you.

The three GEO requirements above are the exception. If your GEO permission is set to View, you can still publish an article, but you cannot personally clear GEO Analysis, GEO Analysis Is Current or AI Answers Reviewed — they stay on the list with no button, and a note explaining that someone with GEO editing access needs to finish that step before the article can go live. This is deliberate: those three items gate AI-written content reaching your site's answer-engine surfaces, so they hold rather than quietly stepping aside. Ask a colleague with GEO editing access to finish the step, or use Request Changes to send the article back. Description and Categories & Tags are not held to the same standard and continue to skip for a View-only reviewer.

Site owners can switch any of the five requirements off individually — see Review Portal settings. Switching AI Answers Reviewed off removes it from this checklist only; the answers are still held back until someone reviews them.

:::tip Open the live article or the full WordPress editor

The portal's top bar has these controls, next to each other:

View Live (once the post is published) or View Preview (while it is still a draft or scheduled) — Opens the post in a new tab, rendered by your theme, so you can check the layout. On a draft, View Preview saves your current edits first. Preview is shown only to reviewers whose WordPress account can edit the post (Editor role or above). View Live is available to anyone already in the portal.
Copy link (once the post is published) — A menu next to View Live, closed until you open it. It always offers Plain address, which copies the article's public address. Every other row is a channel your administrator has switched on under Social sharing (LinkedIn, Facebook, X, Instagram, Email, Text message): pick one and it copies the address with tags that credit you for the visits it brings. With every channel off, Plain address is the only row. It appears as soon as you publish, without a reload. Drafts, scheduled and private posts have no public address, so they have no menu.
Share to (once the post is published, when your administrator has allowed it and a dialog channel is switched on) — Takes the place of Copy link. LinkedIn (when your Management Server offers LinkedIn sign-in), Facebook and X open a dialog, shown with the channel's logo where it has one: type your post and check the character counter and the preview card. For LinkedIn, choose Connect LinkedIn once to sign in to your own account in a small window, then Post to LinkedIn; the status line then offers View post, and Disconnect beside your name removes the connection. For Facebook and X the button copies your text and opens that site's own share window with the tagged link attached; paste your text there. Titles and summaries show as plain text, with no code such as apostrophe or space entities. Each channel row also has a small Copy link button for the address alone (it reads Link copied once it works). If LinkedIn is switched on but your Management Server does not offer sign-in yet, LinkedIn is a plain copy row, and people who can change settings see a one-line note saying why. If Social Publishing has a voice profile, Draft with AI writes a first version for you. Administrators turn the menu on with the Share to menu column of the editing permissions table and choose the channels in the Social sharing block under it (see Editing permissions below); until then reviewers see Copy link.
Request indexing on Google (once the post is published, in the Copy link or Share to menu) — Shown for published, public pages and posts. It is hidden when the page has a password, is private, or your SEO plugin marks it noindex. Press it and the page address is copied and Search Console opens in a new tab; paste the address, press Enter, then click Request indexing. Google offers no way to do that last click for you. When your SEO plugin keeps an IndexNow log (Squirrly SEO and Rank Math do), a line beside the button reads Sent to IndexNow with the date. Administrators choose the Search Console property and an optional Google account email under Request indexing in the Social sharing block; left blank, the property is your site's domain. Once Search Console is connected, the row is highlighted while Google has not indexed the page (see Google index status).
Edit in WordPress (Editor role or above) — Opens the post in the full WordPress block editor in a new tab — handy when you need a capability the streamlined portal doesn't offer, such as reordering blocks or adding an advanced layout.

Your portal tab stays open so you can return to it to keep reviewing or to approve and publish.

:::

:::tip Signing out

Your name sits in the top-right corner of the portal. Hover over it — or tap it on a phone — and a Sign out option appears. Use it when you are on a shared or borrowed computer: it ends your WordPress session and returns you to the portal's sign-in card, so the next person cannot pick up where you left off.

:::

:::tip Review links expire

The link in your review email is valid for the number of days your site owner has configured (the default is 7 days). If you try to open a link after it has expired, you will see an error page. Contact the site owner and ask them to re-send the review link — your draft is still saved and nothing has been lost.

:::

:::note Someone else is editing

If another team member currently has the draft open for editing, you will see a yellow banner at the top of the portal warning you that they are actively editing. You can still make changes, but coordinate with them first to avoid overwriting each other's work. If you know the other person has finished (or has closed their tab), click Take over editing in the banner to claim the draft right away instead of waiting for their session to time out.

:::

:::note Someone changed it since you opened it

If someone else changes the draft after you opened it, even if they have since closed it, the portal does not save over their work. A bar at the top says who changed it (or that it was updated, when no one person did, such as a scheduled publish, or that you changed it yourself in another tab or window), and saving pauses until you choose. What you typed stays on the page, and so does a Request changes note you had not sent yet: it is back in the box the next time you open it. Reload to see their changes opens the latest version, after warning you that anything you typed here will be lost. Save mine anyway asks you to confirm, then saves your version in place of theirs; where your site keeps revisions, their earlier title and text stay in the post's revisions (other fields, such as the SEO settings or categories, are not kept there). If yet another person saves while the bar is open, Save mine anyway stops and names them first. The bar can also appear before you save, as soon as the portal notices the change, including when you swap a picture or reschedule the post.

:::

Step 4: Send to a Colleague (optional)

If you would like another team member to review or edit the draft before you approve it, use the Send to a Colleague option in the portal.

Click Send to a Colleague.
A panel opens showing the team members who are available as reviewers on your site.
Pick the colleague you want to involve, and optionally type a short note to explain what you need from them.
Click Send.

Your colleague receives an email with a link to the same draft portal. They will also need to sign in with their WordPress account. Once added, they have the same editing rights as you — they can save edits and approve the post.

Send to a Colleague is not available when you opened the draft from a copied bundle link that has not been sent yet. Ask the site owner to Send bundle if you need to invite someone else, or if you need to edit the article.

Commenting on someone else's review

Some people can open a draft to comment on it without being one of its reviewers: someone on a copied bundle link that has not been sent yet, and anyone copied on the review email (see Who receives the review email below — they're called watchers there). They get a comment-only version of the portal:

What they see. The article to read (it cannot be typed into), the Preview of how it looks on the site, and the notes on it.
What they can do. Click part of the preview to leave a note, reply to a note, delete their own notes, and use Notify to pass the notes on.
What is not there. Saving, publishing, scheduling, the formatting toolbar, the SEO, GEO, category, author and featured-image panels, image replacement and AI tools, Request changes, Send to a Colleague, and Resolve. Marking a note handled stays with the post's reviewers.

When the site owner uses Send bundle, or adds the person as a reviewer, their next visit opens the full editor.

Step 5: Request changes

If the draft needs revisions before it can be approved, use Request changes to flag it and keep everyone in the loop — without publishing anything.

In the action bar at the bottom of the portal, click Request changes.
A prompt appears. Type a note describing what needs to change — for example, "The introduction references last year's figures — please update them" or "The featured image needs replacing before this goes live".
Click Send & save edits.

When you submit the note, three things happen at once:

Your current edits are saved. Any changes you made to the title, body, SEO fields, or any other panel are preserved on the draft — just as if you had clicked Save draft.
An email notification is sent to the post author and all other reviewers with your note, so they know exactly what to work on.
Your note is added to the Feedback panel on the left side of the portal. Anyone who opens the draft can read the full history of change requests, alongside any notes left on individual images — those are marked with the picture they are about.

The post stays as a draft throughout — nothing is published until someone clicks Approve & Publish.

:::note Feedback panel

The Feedback panel collects every change request submitted for this draft, oldest first, together with any notes left on individual images, notes attached to a page element on the appearance preview, and any message sent with Notify — image notes carry the picture they are about, each reviewer's notes use a matching color, and a resolved one is dimmed rather than removed. Handling or deleting a preview note updates its pin on the appearance preview at the same time. A note on a page element is labeled with the first few words of that element; hover the label to read all of it. Clicking a pin outlines that note's whole card in your brand's primary color. Replies sit in a nested card under the note they answer. It is visible to everyone who has access to the portal, so it keeps an honest record of the review conversation.

Every note in the panel has a Resolve chip, change requests included. Anyone with access can resolve a note — the person who acts on it is usually the one who knows it is done — and a resolved note can be reopened. Resolving the last outstanding change request also clears the Changes requested flag on the review queue, so a draft never shows as handled and not handled at the same time.

Every note also has a Reply chip. Click it to type an answer in a box that opens under the note; your reply is added to the panel, indented beneath the note it answers, so the answer and the question stay together instead of the answer ending up in an email nobody can find later. Notify recipient via email? is on unless you clear it. Leave it ticked and everyone else in that conversation is emailed — the note's original author and anyone else who has already replied to it — unless they no longer have access to the article, or you are answering your own note or your own earlier reply, in which case nobody new is told. Clear it and the reply still stores but is never emailed automatically — not to the thread, and not in anyone's batched email; Notify still lists it, so you can send it deliberately later. Left ticked, the reply also reaches the article's other reviewers in their batched email.

Reply and Resolve does both at once: it posts your answer and marks the note handled in a single step. If the note cannot be marked handled for any reason, your reply is still posted and the panel tells you the note is still open, rather than showing you a note as done when it is not.

Replies go one level deep — you can answer a note, but not answer an answer. A reply belongs to the note it is under, so it never counts as its own outstanding note in the warning shown when you publish: dealing with the note deals with the whole conversation.

If you posted a note by mistake, click the trash control on your own note. The card outlines in red and asks you to confirm before it is removed (you can only delete notes you wrote; site administrators can remove any note). Confirming delete on a note that has replies removes the note and every reply under it together, in one step. If someone replies to the note after you open the confirmation, nothing is deleted: the confirmation stays open, says someone replied meanwhile, and gives the new number of replies. Confirm again to delete the note with them, or cancel.

A reply has its own trash control, separate from the note it answers. Deleting a reply removes only that reply — the note and any other replies stay in place — and works on your own reply even when someone else wrote the note it answers. The confirmation appears under the reply you are deleting.

:::note Describing a picture for search

Open a picture, expand Image Details, and click Generate SEO with AI (a soft-filled button with a sparkle icon). It looks at the actual photo — not at the words around it — and suggests alt text and a caption, which appear in the boxes for you to edit. That includes a remixed version of the photo, even when the remix file is not attached to the article the usual way. When the page is showing a CDN copy, it still describes the file in your media library: the portal sends both the library id and the address on screen, and the server uses the library file. Nothing is saved until you press Apply, the same as everywhere else in the portal. If it cannot run, the portal names the reason instead of a generic failure. If the server does not finish looking at the picture, you see The server did not finish looking at that picture. Try again. rather than That did not work.

This is not Modify with AI. Generate SEO uses Image SEO — a vision-capable provider and model under Content Pipelines → AI Models, plus that provider's key on System / API. Modify with AI uses SyteHero and remakes the picture. The two are independent: remixing can work while Generate SEO still fails, and the other way around. If Image SEO is not set up, the button is not shown at all.

Alt text written from the surrounding article rather than from the picture is confidently wrong about what is in the frame, and a screen reader reads it out as fact. That is why Image SEO AI must point at a model that can actually see an image. See AI Providers.

A pass over every photo, two ways to reach it. Generating a meta description, analyzing answer readiness or refreshing categories and tags each end by offering to run SEO on the article's photos too. The Review Photo AI button in the SEO panel opens the same picker directly, any time, without generating a meta description first. Either way you get a list of every picture with a checkbox — ticked in advance only where there is no alt text at all, including where the alt box just holds the file's own name, which is not a description of anything — plus Check all and Uncheck all links above the list. A picture you leave unticked is not touched. Each ticked picture is one AI call, and the count is shown before you start.

Only pictures actually shown on the article are offered. A picture attached to the post but not shown anywhere in it — not in the body, not set as the featured image — has nowhere for a description to be applied, so the list leaves it out and names how many it left out just above the count: "N picture(s) attached to this article but not shown in it were skipped." If nothing on the article can be described, the Review Photo AI button tells you so instead of opening an empty list; the automatic offer after a meta description simply says nothing, the way it already does when there are no pictures at all.

:::

Step 6: Use the content calendar

The portal includes a Calendar button that opens a month view of your recent, draft, scheduled, and published posts. Each post shows as a chip with a colored bar on the left, and a color key above the grid spells out what each color means: gray for draft, amber for pending review, teal for scheduled, and green for published — plus violet with a dashed edge for Slot held, an article holding a reserved publishing slot. That last row appears in the key only when slot reservation is switched on. Drafts with no date of any kind appear in an Unscheduled drafts list next to the grid. That list shows five at a time, with the same 5/10/25/100 chooser as the review lists.

You don't have to open an article to reach the calendar. The same Calendar button also sits on your review queue page, beside Sign out, and opens exactly the month view described below.

From the calendar you can:

Select a post to open its details card — the full title, its featured image, when it publishes, who is reviewing it, how much feedback it has, and a checklist of what it still needs before it can go live. From the same card you can pick an exact date and time. A past date publishes immediately and keeps that date as the post's publish date; a time less than a minute away publishes now. This works on every device, including phones and tablets.
Move a live article to a past or current day — it stays on your site with that new published date. A future day is refused, so a live article cannot be pulled back onto the schedule. This needs publish permission, same as taking the article back to a draft.
Drag a scheduled post to a new day to move it to a different publish date. Dragging needs a mouse or trackpad — on a touchscreen, select the post instead.
Drag a post from Unscheduled drafts onto a day to give it a publish date.
Drag an article that is holding a slot to a new day to turn that hold into a real schedule. It keeps the time the slot reserved — only the day moves.
Unschedule a scheduled post — select it and click Unschedule in the picker. It returns to the Unscheduled drafts list and will not publish until you give it a new date.

Articles holding a publishing slot

If your site reserves a publishing slot for each arriving article, those articles are drawn on the grid on the day they are holding, in violet with a dashed left edge. The dashes are there on purpose: the date is provisional. Nothing publishes on its own — the moment is simply being kept for the article until someone approves it. These articles are not in the Unscheduled drafts list, because an article holding a date is not unscheduled.

Select one and its card opens with the held date already filled in, labeled Slot held. There is no Unschedule button, because there is no schedule to cancel yet — approve the article to publish it then, or type a different date.
Drag one onto another day to turn the hold into a real schedule on that day. It keeps the time the slot reserved, so only the day moves. This needs the same publish permission, and raises the same cadence warning, as scheduling any other draft.
A slot that has already gone by is not shown on the grid. Once its moment has passed, nothing will publish the article at that time, so it goes back to the Unscheduled drafts list — approving it then publishes right away, or you can pick a new date.
A slot in another month isn't visible on this month's grid, exactly like a post scheduled for next month. It stays out of Unscheduled drafts either way, so the same article never appears and disappears as you page between months.

This applies only when Reserve publishing slots is switched on. With it off, the calendar behaves exactly as it always has. See Reserving slots for new articles.

Cadence warnings

If your site has a publishing rhythm, the calendar can tell you when a date breaks it. You describe the rhythm once — which days you publish on, your usual time, the most articles you want in a single day, and the smallest gap you want between two of them — and after that, choosing a date that clashes brings up a short warning before anything is scheduled.

The warning tells you what the problem is, names any articles already booked nearby, and offers the next date and time that fits. (Choosing a day you do not normally publish on is flagged on its own, with nothing to name.) You then choose:

Use suggested time fills the date field with that slot. Nothing is scheduled until you confirm.
Schedule anyway goes ahead with the date you picked.

It never blocks you. A cadence warning is advice, not a rule — every date you could schedule before, you can still schedule. If the check itself cannot run for any reason, the schedule simply goes through as normal. And if you close the card before the check has answered, your article is still scheduled — if the date turned out to clash, you get a short note saying so rather than a silent cancellation.

The same check runs when you drag an article onto a day, where it appears as a short confirmation instead of a panel.

Cadence warnings also apply to the article's own Schedule control, not just the calendar: clicking Approve & Schedule or Update schedule with a new or moved time raises the same warning if it clashes. Just recording a time without approving — see Setting a time without publishing yet — does not, because nothing is actually being scheduled yet.

A reviewer can uncheck Respect publishing cadence on a draft to publish that article outside the site rhythm. The checkbox appears only when publishing cadence or reserved slots are on, and never on a live article.

Cadence warnings are off until someone turns them on. See Publishing cadence for the settings.

On a phone or tablet

The calendar adapts to the screen you are on:

On a smaller tablet screen (and in portrait), the Unscheduled drafts list moves below the month grid so the grid keeps its full width. On a large tablet in landscape it stays beside the grid, just narrower. On any touchscreen, buttons and posts grow to comfortable tap sizes.
On a phone, the month grid becomes a compact overview — each day with something scheduled is marked with a dot — and a schedule list appears below it, showing every post for that month with its time, title and status, plus your unscheduled drafts. Unscheduled drafts page five at a time, with the same 5/10/25/100 chooser as the review lists. That list is where you read and tap; the date picker opens from the bottom of the screen.

A few rules apply:

You can only move posts you're allowed to edit.
Scheduling a draft (giving it a publish date) requires publish permission, following the same Who can publish setting described below. So does unscheduling one, and so does turning a held slot into a real schedule.
Published posts can't be moved or unscheduled.
An article holding a publishing slot can be dragged like a scheduled one, but it isn't scheduled until you drop it on a day or approve it.
You can open any post's details, even one you can't move. Reading isn't editing. For a post that isn't yours to change, the card shows what it is and when it publishes, and leaves out the working detail — who's reviewing it, its feedback, and its readiness checklist.

:::note Reviewers see the full calendar

As a reviewer, you see the full upcoming calendar so you have context on everything coming up — but you can only drag or reschedule the posts you have permission to edit. You can open any post to see what it is and when it publishes; everything beyond that is shown only for posts you're on.

:::

Your review queue

Every reviewer-facing email — a new draft, an updated draft, a change request, or an invitation from a colleague — includes a footer link to Posts and Pages Awaiting Your Review: a single page listing every draft currently waiting on you, so you don't have to hunt through your inbox for the right email. Like every other portal page, it carries your site's logo, name, and colors in a topbar at the top.

The queue can list posts and pages side by side so you can scan both at once. The content calendar stays one column.

Sign in required. Like the portal itself, you must be signed in to your WordPress account to see the queue — SyteOps checks your account against the reviewers assigned to each draft, so you only ever see posts and pages you're actually on.
Administrators see everything. A WordPress administrator opening the queue sees every draft currently assigned to any reviewer, not just their own.
No link expiry. Once you're signed in, opening a draft from your review queue always works, even past the normal review-link expiry window — your WordPress session is what proves who you are, not the link.
"Received" means received. Each row shows the date the article arrived for review, and it keeps showing that date no matter what happens to the article afterwards — scheduling it, moving it, or cancelling the schedule. A scheduled article shows both: when it arrived, and when it will publish.
The calendar is here too. A Calendar button sits at the top of the page, next to Sign out. It opens the same month view described in Use the content calendar — the same grid, the same Unscheduled drafts list, color key, phone view, details card and drag-to-reschedule — so you can see what else is coming up without opening an article first. The button appears only for accounts that are allowed to use the calendar; if you don't see it, ask your site administrator. The same permission rules apply once it's open: you can only move articles you're allowed to edit, and scheduling or unscheduling one follows the site's Who can publish setting. Some links open the page with the calendar already showing, so you don't have to click the button yourself.
Bundle items are grouped. Pages and posts in a bundle you review, including ones already published, are listed together under that bundle's name, in the order the bundles were created, with the name linking back to the bundle. Anything not part of a bundle is listed on its own beneath the groups, exactly as before.
The newest items first. Each list shows five items at a time, with a chooser for 5, 10, 25, or 100. Next loads the next series from the server through the authorized catalog, so older authorized items are reachable. If the site has a very large backlog, a safety scan may still show a note reading "Older items may not be listed." When you see that note, some older articles may be waiting on you even though they aren't shown — open them from their original review email, or ask your site administrator.
A page-review bundle uses the same queue. My Portal from a bundle opens this same page filtered to that bundle's remaining items, including pages and posts that are already published, with the bundle name under Your Reviews. If the bundle is missing or you are not listed on it, the page stays empty — it does not fall back to every draft you can review. A bundle list shows its pages in the bundle's own order, the same order as the bundle email and the bundle strip, and keeps that order as you load more, so the remaining items in that bundle are still reachable.
Older "See all my reviews" links open your private review page. If you're a team member with a linked WordPress account, a See all my reviews link from any email you already have — and My Portal at the top of every review screen — now takes you to your own private review page, still filtered to the bundle when the link came from one. If you aren't signed in, you sign in first and then land there. Opening someone else's private link while signed in as yourself is refused, with an option to switch accounts.
Links straight to one item. A private review page link can point at a single article or page, and at its content or appearance view. If you can still review that item, it opens directly. If you can't, your review page opens with the note "That item isn't available to you anymore."
Rows open the view you were asked to review. A page always opens its appearance view — there's no article body to edit on a page, so that's the only review there is. An article opens its appearance view too once someone has asked you to look at how it renders (for example, after a Send page or a page-review bundle); otherwise it opens straight to the content editor, the same way it always has. When an article has an appearance request on file, its row also carries a second, smaller link to the other view, so you can always reach both.

Bookmark the queue page, or just click the footer link in your next review email, to check what's waiting on you at any time. Site owners can also reach it from Content Pipelines → Log, using the Open my review queue button.

Each row also shows how many questions the AI search analysis recorded for that article and how many of them have answers — for example 12 Q · 9 answered — so you can tell at a glance whether an article's answers still need finishing.

Filtering the queue

A filter bar near the top of the page lets you narrow what's shown, using plain drop-downs and an Apply button — no JavaScript required:

Type — Posts | Pages (the default), posts only, pages only, or all types.
Status — draft, pending, scheduled, or live only, or every status (the default).
Source — narrow to one content source, when your site ingests articles from more than one. This drop-down only appears once your site has at least one content source configured.
Sort by — the order of the Awaiting Your Review list: Recently updated (the default), Received: newest first, Received: oldest first, and, when your site lets reviewers or the publishing cadence plan a publish time, Planned publish date: soonest first or latest first. Received sorts by the date each row shows (the recorded received date, or the article's own date when none was recorded); an article that shows no received date, or has no planned publish date, is listed last whichever direction you choose. A chosen sort lists rows in that order and does not group bundle pages under their heading. One choice orders both the Posts and the Pages lists, and it stays when you page through the list or use the quick filters. Clear filters puts it back to Recently updated. A page-review bundle keeps the bundle's own saved order and shows no sort menu. The other sections keep their own order.

Ordering Published Content. Inside the Published Content section, three links set its order: Recently updated (the default), Newest published and Oldest published, by each article's published date. Choosing one opens the section and scrolls to it, keeps your other filters and your Sort by choice, and stays when you page through; Clear filters puts it back. A page-review bundle keeps the bundle's own order, so no links appear there, or where the section isn't shown.

Filters apply everywhere on the page — Awaiting Your Review, Watching, Coming Up, Notes & Replies for You, and Published Content — and a section that no longer applies disappears rather than showing an empty list. The queue opens in Posts | Pages (two columns) unless you pick Posts, Pages, or All types. Choosing Live for status, for example, hides Awaiting Your Review entirely and shows only your live articles. Filtered lists still show five at a time, with the same 5/10/25/100 chooser, and Next loads the next series from the authorized catalog. If a safety scan hits its ceiling, the page can still show "Older items may not be listed." A Clear filters link appears once you've narrowed the list, taking you back to Posts | Pages. Filters are carried in the page's own link, so bookmarking or sharing a filtered view keeps the filter active; if you're using the older "See all my reviews" link, filters still keep your bundle scope.

Watching

If you're copied as a Default CC reviewer on anything, those drafts and scheduled articles appear beneath your Awaiting Your Review list, under Watching — as long as you don't already have full reviewer access to them (those stay up in Awaiting Your Review instead, so nothing is listed twice). Rows open the same way as your other queue rows, and the section simply doesn't appear if you aren't watching anything. It pages the same way as the rest of the queue — five at a time, with the 5/10/25/100 chooser, and Next through the authorized catalog. When a safety scan may have missed older items it says "Older ones may not be listed." rather than quietly leaving them out — including when nothing at all could be shown within that scan, so the section appears with just that note instead of disappearing. If everything you were watching turned out to be scheduled, the note points you at Coming Up where those items are listed, rather than telling you none were found.

Coming Up

Anything that's already been scheduled — whether it's one of your own drafts or one you're only watching — moves to a Coming Up section, soonest first, showing the date and time it's due to go out in your site's own timezone. A scheduled item appears here only: it's no longer listed under Awaiting Your Review or Watching, so nothing you already reviewed and scheduled keeps nagging you as if it still needed a look. The section doesn't appear at all if nothing is scheduled.

Notes & Replies for You

A Notes & Replies for You section collects notes elsewhere on the site that are personally yours to see — even on drafts you aren't actively reviewing today. A note lands here when someone replies to a note you left, when someone leaves a new, still-open note on something you review or watch, or when someone uses Notify to point a note directly at you — that last case shows up even if you've since opened the article, since being told about a note is worth seeing regardless. It never lists your own notes or replies. Each row shows the item's title, who wrote it, a short excerpt, when it was left, and a link that opens straight to that note — landing on the on-page appearance view when the note is pinned to an image or an on-page element, or the regular content view otherwise — and scrolls right to it. The list shows the newest 30 and the section doesn't appear at all once you're caught up.

Published Content

Beneath the drafts awaiting you, Published Content lists any published posts and pages you're assigned to. That heading matches Your Reviews at the top of the page. Open Live Posts and Pages You Can Edit when you want them — Posts and Pages inside that list, and under Awaiting Your Review, are labeled in capitals. If you have none, the section doesn't appear at all.

These behave differently from drafts, and the page says so:

Changes go live immediately. There's no approval step — opening one of these in the portal and saving publishes the change straight away. If the article shouldn't be live at all, you can take it back to a draft instead — see below.
Answer coverage. Each row shows the same question and answer counts as a draft.
"Answers not signed off". If your site publishes AI-written answers to search engines and nobody has confirmed the answers on that article, the row says so. Those answers are held back from every answer-engine surface until someone reviews them in the article's GEO panel, so this is worth acting on if you want them live.
View live. A link to the published post or page as your readers see it. If your site is set up to exclude internal traffic, this link carries that exclusion, so checking your own work doesn't show up in your site's analytics.

Taking a live article back to draft

Sometimes an article goes live before it should have — a claim needs checking, a client asks for it to come down, or it simply wasn't ready. You don't have to delete it or scramble to edit it in place.

Open the article in the portal and click Revert to draft in the action bar. The portal asks you to confirm, then takes the article off your site and turns it back into an ordinary draft you can keep working on. When it's ready again, publish it exactly the way you'd publish any other draft.

A few things worth knowing before you use it:

You need permission to publish. Taking an article down is treated the same way as putting it up, so it follows the site's Who can publish setting. Reviewers who can't publish don't see the button at all.
The article keeps its date and its web address. Reverting doesn't reset the publication date, so publishing it again puts the same article back at the same address — it isn't relaunched as a brand-new post. Anyone who linked to it or bookmarked it still lands in the right place.
Your site tidies up after itself. The article drops out of your blog listings, and the AI files your site publishes — llms.txt and your answer-engine surfaces — are rebuilt without it automatically. There's nothing extra for you to clean up.
Save before you revert. The page reloads once the article comes down, so anything you've typed but not saved is lost. Click Save changes first if you want to keep your edits.
A private article comes back private — but only if you publish it immediately. If the article was published privately, so only signed-in staff could read it, publishing it again straight away puts it back exactly that way, and the confirmation email says plainly that it went out privately rather than describing it as live on the site. Scheduling it for a later date does not: WordPress itself handles scheduled publishing, and it publishes to everyone. Choosing a schedule is the moment the private setting is given up. Cancelling that schedule afterwards will not bring it back, and neither will publishing by hand from there — your site stops keeping the note as soon as the schedule is accepted. So if the article needs to stay private, publish it immediately rather than scheduling it, and if one has already gone out to everyone, set its visibility back to private in WordPress.
Social posts timed for a later date are cancelled; ones set to go out on publishing are kept. If an announcement for this article was queued for a particular date and time, reverting cancels it, so nothing points your followers at a page that isn't there any more. The confirmation box tells you before you commit, and cancelling can't be undone from here — if you publish the article again, queue that announcement again too. An announcement set to go out when the article publishes is left alone instead: it hasn't been sent, it can't go out while the article is a draft, and it will simply go out when you publish the article again — so the wording somebody already wrote isn't thrown away.
Social posts already sent are not pulled back. If publishing the article announced it to a social account, that announcement stays up — it was sent at the time and can't be recalled from here. Remove it on the social network itself if you need it gone.
Nobody is emailed. Unlike cancelling a schedule, reverting is a quiet action — no notification goes out to the author or the other reviewers. Let them know yourself if they're expecting the article to be live.

Who receives the review email

The notification list for each new draft is made up of two groups:

The post author — always included automatically.
Default reviewers and Default CC reviewers — team members you have added to the notification list in the Review Portal settings.

To configure the default list, go to SyteOps → Content Pipelines, open the Review Portal settings, and look for the Default reviewers and Default CC reviewers fields. Make sure each contributor is also linked to a WordPress author on the Users tab — this ensures their articles are published under the correct byline and they appear in the reviewer lists.

Default reviewers are the primary recipients of the email and can edit the draft. Later emails about the article — changes requested, published, and so on — reach each of them separately, and never the person whose action caused the email (one email per person).
Default CC reviewers are copied on the email as watchers — they can open the draft and comment on it, but not edit or publish it. Someone who is both a default reviewer and a default CC is a reviewer, full stop.

A content source can set its own reviewer or CC list. When that list is empty, the Review Portal defaults above are used. When it is not empty, it replaces the defaults for that source only (it does not merge).

When you change these lists

Adding someone to the reviewer or CC list applies to articles still awaiting review, not only to future ones. The next time SyteOps emails about an unpublished article — a resend, or a changes requested notification — anyone you have added since it arrived is included: a new reviewer gains edit access, and a new CC can open the article and watch it. This is what makes adding a new team member work as you would expect: they start receiving the drafts that are still in flight, rather than only articles that arrive afterwards. A resend goes to the reviewers and the author only — CCs are not re-mailed by it.

A CC added to a draft's allowlist before your site supported watchers keeps whatever access it already had — that is not undone automatically.

This happens when the email is sent, so there is one thing to know: a newly added reviewer will not see those in-flight drafts in See all my reviews until one of those emails has gone out for them. If you want someone brought up to date immediately, use Resend review email on the articles concerned.

Two limits are deliberate:

Published articles are never changed. An article that has already gone live keeps the reviewer list it had. Adding someone to your defaults never hands them access to your published back catalog.
Removing someone does not revoke their access. Taking a person off the default lists stops them being added to new articles, but it does not remove them from drafts they were already assigned to — SyteOps cannot tell that apart from someone a colleague deliberately invited to that specific article with Send to a Colleague. To remove someone from a particular draft, use the reviewer list in the portal for that article.

The same holds when your content source sends an update to an article it already delivered. The update adds anyone newly on the source's lists, and nobody is taken off: people you invited to that draft yourself — with Send to a Colleague, Send page, or a bundle send — keep their access and keep receiving its emails. If the update names a different author, the previous author also stays on the draft.

Email notifications

Every automated portal email is controlled from one place: SyteOps → Content Pipelines → Review Portal, in the Email notifications card. Each can be switched on or off independently:

New draft received (on by default) — emails the author, the reviewers and anyone watching the article when a new article arrives and its review draft is created. This is the main review email, with the article preview, who can review it, and the secure editor link. The article date in that email uses the site timezone in 12-hour AM/PM (for example, 7:33 PM), independent of WordPress's 24-hour time setting.
Draft updated by source (off by default) — emails the author, the reviewers and anyone watching the article when your content source re-delivers an article with changed content, so nobody reviews a stale version. Identical re-deliveries (delivery retries) never send an email.
Published or scheduled (on by default) — tells the author, the reviewers and anyone watching the article when a draft is scheduled, and again when it goes live. The person who published or scheduled it is not emailed — they already saw it happen. If the article was published with private visibility, the email says so and links to it as a private post, rather than describing it as live on the site. An already-scheduled article moved to a new time gets its own Rescheduled email, naming the old publishing time beside the new one, rather than reading like a first-time schedule notice. These schedule emails go out however the time was set, moved or cancelled — the portal, the content calendar, the WordPress editor, Quick Edit, or another tool — but only for articles that came through review, the same rule as the now live email below. Taking a scheduled article back to a draft sends an Unscheduled email, to the people who were emailed about the schedule, that names who did it and when the article was going to publish; someone whose schedule email had not gone out yet is not told either way. While Content Pipelines is in Setup mode, schedule changes made outside the portal and the calendar send nothing.

The now live email goes out however the article went live: from the portal, the content calendar, the WordPress editor, or on its own at its scheduled time (then everyone involved is told). Each go-live sends it once. Saving an article that is already live, or changing a live article's published date, sends nothing; taking it back to draft and publishing it again sends it again. It is only sent for articles that came through review — delivered by a content source, sent to reviewers, or part of a bundle. Posts you write and publish yourself, and articles from a source set to publish as soon as they arrive, stay quiet. While Content Pipelines is in Setup mode, articles that go live outside the portal send nothing. The email's main button opens the live article. If you're a team member with a linked WordPress account, a second button labeled My Portal opens your own private review page; if you aren't linked, that button reads See all my reviews and opens the shared review queue instead. If your mail server refuses the notice outright and nobody receives it, the notice is retried once a few minutes later; if that also fails, republishing the article sends it.
Source held (needs attention) (on by default) — alerts the site admin (not the reviewers) when a live content source stops matching its approved field mapping: incoming articles are put safely on hold, and this email tells you to re-approve the mapping, then use Reprocess last payload on the source to bring in the article that triggered the hold. It sends once per incident, not on every held delivery.
Auto-defer limit reached (on by default) — emails the article's author and the reviewers already on it when the auto-defer feature runs out of moves for a reserved time and hands the article back for scheduling by hand. This is not sent on every ordinary move forward — only when the article reaches the limit, and nothing is published when it does.
Publishing reminder (off by default) — emails the article's author and the reviewers already on it when a publishing time is coming up for a draft that still needs somebody to approve it. Once an article is actually scheduled it goes out on its own, so it gets no reminder — there is nothing left for anyone to do. A hand-written article you scheduled yourself, with no reviewers on it, does not get this email either. How far ahead it looks is set by Reminder lead time (1–168 hours, default 24); the check runs hourly, so the email arrives up to that far ahead rather than exactly that far. Each person hears about a given publishing time once — changing the time arms the reminder again.

These two emails go only to people already on the article — its author, and the reviewers it was sent to. Standing CC addresses from Default CCs are not added on top, and watchers do not receive either one, so on a site that relies on a standing CC or watcher list these two emails reach fewer people than the ones sent when a draft first arrives. That is deliberate: everyone on that list can open the article, and anybody else would get a link that asks them to sign in and then turns them away.
Reviewer notes (on by default) — lets a reviewer send this article's notes, and a message of their own, to one person who already has the article: the reviewer picks a name and presses Send, and one email covers every note that person has not been sent yet plus anything listed under Previously Resolved Notes. Turning this off removes the Notify control from the portal, so nobody presses a button that would go nowhere; reviewers can still write and resolve notes. This same setting also governs the email sent when someone replies to a note, and the automatic notes email below — turning it off silences all three.
Include alternate work email and Include personal email (both off by default) — widen every email above to also reach a reviewer's other stored addresses (set on the Users tab) in addition to their WordPress account email.

Batched emails and the batch window

The new draft, draft updated, scheduled and unscheduled notices — including an already-scheduled article moved to a new time, whether that happens on the content calendar or from the editor's own Schedule button, which reads Rescheduled — plus the publishing reminder and the auto-defer "still waiting for review" notice, are not sent the moment they happen. Every one of these reads the same whether it arrives on its own or grouped with others in a batched email: the reviewer names and article details on a new draft, the Publishing/Planned distinction on a reminder, and the "nothing has been published" note on a still-waiting-for-review notice all carry through into the grouped email exactly as they read alone. They wait a short while so that a burst of activity reaches each person as one email: twenty articles arriving together send each reviewer one email listing all twenty, grouped by what happened, rather than twenty emails. A reminder and a give-up notice queued alongside an ordinary draft update land in that same combined email. One article gets one card even when its news changes twice in the same window — a schedule set and then moved again, or a draft ingested and then revised again, still shows as a single card, carrying the latest information. When one or more of a page bundle's items land together in that same email, the bundle's own note — the one you can add under Content Pipelines → Page Bundles — appears once, labeled with the bundle's name and set apart with a light left border around that group of pages, exactly as it does in the direct Send bundle email; it also appears once, the same way, in the publishing reminder and the "still waiting for review" notice. It reaches only people the bundle itself names as a reviewer, or who authored one of its pages — someone else on the same email still sees the page's own card, just not the bundle's note.

A page bundle's note for reviewers appears in a grouped email only alongside a request to review one of its pages: a new or updated draft, a publishing reminder or a still-waiting-for-review notice. Later activity on those pages, such as new notes or a schedule change, arrives without it.

Batch window (0–240 minutes, default 15) — how long those notices wait once things go quiet. Each new notice for a person — including another note saved on an article whose notes are already waiting — restarts that person's wait, so a whole review session arrives as one email once the activity settles, not one every few minutes. The wait usually ends within four windows of the first notice (one hour at the default, four hours at most), and two batched emails to the same person are always at least one window apart — so a notice arriving just after an email went, or the rest of a very large pile, waits for that window first. Publishing reminders and the "still waiting for review" notice wait the same way. Set it to 0 to send each notice right away; it is still sent in the background, so publishing or receiving an article never waits on the mail server.
Send unsent notes with the batched email (on by default, needs Reviewer notes on) — a note saved in the portal waits out the batch window and then reaches the article's author and reviewers who have not been told about it, in the same email as their other updates: notes on three articles in one sitting arrive as one email, each note in full, under its article. A very long batch of notes shows as many as fit and ends with and N more notes; the rest follow in the next email. The note's author is never emailed about their own note. A reply posted with Notify recipient via email? cleared is never sent this way, nor is a note somebody left unchecked when they pressed Notify for that person. A person who turned Reply notifications off on their own page does not get it either. Notify still sends at once, and whatever it sends is not sent again. Turn this off to go back to notes reaching people only when someone presses Notify.
An article about to publish is never announced late. A scheduled notice goes out at least half an hour before the article's publishing time, and a publishing reminder at least five minutes before, taking anything else waiting for that person with it — the reminder even if that person's last batched email went out only moments earlier.
An article publishing within half an hour gets one email, not two. Its scheduled notice is held, and the now live email that follows is the one people receive. If the article is moved to a later time instead, the scheduled notice goes out as usual with the new time; if it is unscheduled, nothing is sent.
One waiting notice sends its usual email. The combined email is used only when two or more notices are waiting.
Notices check again before they go. If the article was published, deleted or unscheduled in the meantime, or the person no longer has access to it, or the email type was switched off, that notice is dropped rather than sent.
A refused send is retried after 5, 15 and 60 minutes — it waits out that delay even if other notices for the same person go out in between, and it goes on its own rather than taking the rest of an ongoing burst with it — and is given up on after five failed attempts. A notice given up on is written to the article's activity, so the loss is visible rather than silent. The now live email and the emails sent when someone acts on an article (below) are not batched.
A very large pile is sent in groups. At most 25 waiting notices go in one email; anything left follows in the next one, one batch window later. Only the first few articles in a combined email carry their picture inside the message — the rest link to theirs — so one email can never grow large enough for a mail server to refuse it.

One email per person

The emails sent when someone acts on an article — a changes request, a colleague hand-off, reviewer notes, a reply to a note, a resend, a page or bundle sent for review, and the published or scheduled notice — go to each person on their own, and so do the batched new draft, draft updated, scheduled, publishing reminder and "still waiting for review" notices. Nobody sees who else received the email, and nobody is copied on someone else's — people watching an article get their own copy rather than a CC.

You are not emailed about your own actions. If you request changes, publish, pass on notes or reply to one, everyone else involved hears about it, but you do not. Three emails are the exception, because a resend usually exists precisely because somebody did not receive the first one. Send page and Send bundle let you choose the recipients by name, so ticking your own name gets you a copy; Resend has no picker at all — it goes to the article's current reviewers and its author, so it reaches you whenever you are one of them.
The buttons open your private review page. For someone linked to a WordPress account on the Users tab, the main button of a review request, an update notice, a colleague hand-off, a changes request, a reviewer-notes email, a resend, and a page or bundle send opens the article straight from their private review page — in the view it was sent for, such as appearance for a page — and a second button labeled My Portal opens the whole page. People who are not linked get the article's secure link and a second button labeled See all my reviews, which opens the shared review queue, as before. The published or scheduled notice is the one exception: it keeps its single button straight to the article itself.
Large lists finish in the background. If an email is going to a lot of people, the portal sends as many as it can straight away and the rest follow within a few minutes. Anyone who lost access to the article in the meantime is skipped, and so is anyone who has since turned that kind of email off.
A turned-away "Now live" email is tried again. If a person's "Now live" email is turned away, the site tries that person again a few times over the next couple of hours; people who already received it are not emailed twice. For an email you send by pressing a button — such as Request changes or Resend — the portal tells you who could not be reached instead, so you can decide whether to send it again.

A Reply-To address field lets replies to the reviewer-facing emails (review requests, update notices, colleague invites, change requests, and published confirmations) go to a person (for example, your editor) instead of the site's sending address — leave it blank to keep the default. The administrator "payload held" alert always replies to the sending address. Two optional fields polish the emails' footer: a Footer tagline (a short line about your business) and a Footer phone (shown as a click-to-call link). Both appear in the dark footer bar of every portal email, alongside your company name. All emails carry your portal branding — logo, company name, and colors — from the Branding settings below.

When an email you triggered from the portal — publishing, sending to a colleague, requesting changes, or replying to a note — cannot be sent, the portal tells you instead of reporting success.

When an email reached some people but not everyone — or reached a person at one of their addresses while another address on file turned it away — it counts as sent. The confirmation names who was emailed and who could not be reached, so you can tell at a glance whether anyone still needs it. That applies everywhere an email goes out from a button: Resend, Send page, Send bundle, a colleague hand-off, Request changes, publishing, replying to a note and Notify. Pressing Resend, Send page or Send bundle again emails everyone on the list again, including the people who already received it, so check the names first. Someone the site is still trying to reach after a publish is shown as "Could not reach [name] yet — we will try again shortly." Whatever you did still happened: the post is published, the colleague has access, your note or reply is saved. When an email was switched off or there was nobody to send it to, the portal says nothing extra, and when a scheduling notice is waiting for the next short batch window the confirmation says it will be sent shortly.

You can also see each email's outcome in the run history: each draft-creation row on the Log notes whether the notification was sent, skipped (and why — for example, when no recipients could be resolved), or failed, and held rows note when the admin was alerted — so a missing email is never a mystery.

Review Portal settings (for site owners)

:::tip Publishing cadence

This panel also holds the Publishing cadence card, which drives the cadence warnings on the calendar. Its settings are described with that feature.

:::

Site owners can configure the Review Portal from SyteOps → Content Pipelines, then the Review Portal settings view.

Every settings view is a stack of cards, one per topic. On the Review Portal view they are Review and approval rules, Remix presets, Publishing cadence, Pre-publish requirements, Reviewer editing permissions, Email notifications and Review Portal branding.

Open and close a card. Click a card's heading (or press Enter or Space when it is focused) to open or close it. The first time you visit a view, its first card is open and the rest are closed, so the page is a short list of headings instead of one long scroll. After that each card stays the way you left it. That choice is remembered in your browser only: it is not a site setting, another person sees their own, and clearing your browser data resets it.

On this page. A slim bar under the tab header names the view you are in and has one button per card. Click one to open that card and jump to it; the button for the card at the top of the screen is highlighted as you scroll. The bar stays at the top of the screen while you scroll, and Expand all and Collapse all sit at its right end. When there are more buttons than fit, the row scrolls sideways. A jump is recorded in the address bar, so you can copy the address to send someone straight to a card. A closed card that holds a warning is marked Needs attention on its heading, and its button in the bar carries a matching mark, so a warning is never out of sight.

Closing a card only hides it on screen. Settings inside a closed card still save when you click Save settings, and so do the settings of the other settings views (Social Publishing, AI Models, Images, Answer Engine).

Unsaved changes. As soon as a setting differs from what is saved, the line beside Save settings reads Unsaved changes, and the button for that view gets a dot. Change a setting back by hand and the line clears. When the unsaved change is in a different view from the one you are looking at, the line names it (for example, "Unsaved changes in Review Portal"). If you try to close the tab or reload while something is unsaved, your browser asks before it lets go. Save settings saves every settings view at once.

When a setting can't be saved. If a value is not valid (for example a Reply-To address that is not an email), the line turns red and says what is wrong, and you are taken to the field: its view and its card open, the field is outlined and ready to type in, and nothing is saved until you fix it. If the server declines one value but accepts the rest, the line says so and marks the declined field.

Buttons that apply at once. A few buttons act as soon as you click them and do not wait for Save settings. They carry an Applies immediately label. The ones that reload the page ask first when you have unsaved changes, so you do not lose them by accident.

Branding

This is the Review Portal branding card, the last one on the Review Portal view. Click Branding in the On this page bar to open it.

By default the portal uses the same logo, company name, and colors you have set in your general site branding. If you want the review emails and portal page to display different branding — for example, a client-facing brand rather than your internal agency name — enable Override branding for the Review Portal and fill in the alternative company name, logo URL, and color pickers. When you turn the override on, the color fields start from your current branding so you can adjust from there instead of from blank.

Use the Preview Portal button to open a read-only preview of the portal — with your current branding applied — right inside the admin, so you can see exactly how it looks before sending a review link. The preview is read-only: nothing in it can save, publish, or change a post. In the preview window's title bar you can click the expand icon to grow the preview to fill your whole screen (click again to shrink it back), or the open-in-new-tab icon to view the portal as a standalone full page.

Article images

Under Content Pipelines → Images → Article images you decide what happens to pictures an article is still borrowing from another site.

Import images on publish — copy remote images into your media library. On by default; reviewers can override per article or revert.
Keep alt text and title, Keep captions — copy those from the article. Both on by default.
Record where each image came from — store import date and article. The original URL is always kept so revert works.
Read metadata from the image file — read title and description from the file. Off by default — AI images rarely have useful metadata.

If an article has more pictures than one publish can safely fetch, the rest are copied in the background over the following minutes, and the reviewer is told that copying is continuing.

The Unused pictures permission shows or hides the unused-pictures card (including Delete unused). Hide it if a reviewer should not remove unused files. Delete unused lists a picture only when it finds no use of it: it checks every page and post (including the one you are editing: its text, excerpt and custom fields), the site settings (icon, logo, widgets), categories, user profiles, comments, and the pictures currently in your editor, even before you save. A picture chosen in a field plugin's image field or in any installed theme's settings, including one you are not using now, is recognized whatever the field is called. It checks again when you confirm, and a picture it cannot be sure about is kept. A picture that custom code stores only as a bare number, under a name that says nothing about pictures, cannot be recognized for certain, and neither can one your public site displayed in the last 90 days that nothing else on the site names: each is listed under May still be in use, not ticked, with the place the number was found, and only an administrator can delete it, after confirming. If the name says the number is something else (a size, a count, a switch, a user's id), the number is taken for that and the picture is listed as unused, so check before deleting if your site stores pictures under such names. It also reads the pictures your slider plugins keep (Revolution Slider, Smart Slider 3 and LayerSlider), the Links manager, network settings on a multisite network and your theme's own files. It does not look inside other plugins' custom tables unless your site administrator has added them, so a picture used only there can still be offered; check before deleting if you use such a plugin. If you removed a slider plugin, its leftover tables still name their pictures and those pictures stay kept until the tables are dropped. The grant is set in Reviewer editing permissions; it defaults to Allow.

Pre-publish requirements

Publish is blocked until these are met. All of the following are on by default:

GEO Analysis has run
GEO Analysis Is Current — required after the article changes. Formatting-only edits are ignored.
Description present
Categories & Tags assigned — exactly one category and at least one tag
AI Answers Reviewed — required when answers are published

A requirement is skipped when the reviewer cannot act on it (no permission for that area, or the AI behind it is not configured) — except the three GEO requirements above. A reviewer whose GEO permission is View only still sees and is blocked by all three; a note tells them someone with GEO editing access needs to finish the step, since these are the requirements that keep AI-written content off your answer-engine surfaces until a person has checked it.

Turning AI Answers Reviewed off here only removes it from the publish checklist — it does not change what appears on your answer-engine surfaces. An article's questions and answers are held back from every one of those surfaces until someone ticks I have reviewed these answers in the article's GEO panel, whether or not this requirement is switched on. See Reviewing the answers before they go live.

Analyze GEO automatically is off by default. When it is on (and a GEO provider is configured), analysis runs:

Once when the article first arrives.
Again a few minutes after its text changes, for drafts, pending and scheduled articles. This covers an edit made anywhere: in the Review Portal, in the WordPress editor, or by a later delivery of the same article that changed its words. A change to the words of the title or the body counts; formatting alone does not.

Each run is a paid AI call, so SyteOps keeps the number down: it waits about five minutes so several edits in a row cost one call, it waits longer while someone has the article open in the Review Portal, it does not retry text that already failed to analyze, and it runs at most six times a day for one article. After that the article shows as needing analysis until someone clicks Analyze GEO.

Two things never happen automatically. Published articles are not re-analyzed: a new answer has to be accepted by a person before it is shown to answer engines, so a published article whose text changed appears as Stale on the Coverage screen instead. And answers are never accepted automatically: if a run finds a new question, I have reviewed these answers is cleared and someone has to tick it again.

Turn a requirement off if your workflow publishes without it — for example, if you do not use tags. Whatever you leave on is enforced in the portal and on the server.

AI Models

These settings have their own AI Models view on the Content Pipelines tab. Like the other settings views, it saves with the shared Save settings button.

Every AI choice the portal makes is here — one row per feature, named by what it powers, plus a readiness pill (Ready, Needs key, or Not configured):

Article writing & remix (Content) — rewrites, meta descriptions and taxonomy suggestions inside the portal.
Answer-engine analysis (GEO) — the answer-engine analysis in the GEO panel.
Ingest field mapping (Ingest) — proposes how an inbound content-source payload maps to your post fields.
Social posts (Social) — composes the post text for Send to webhook. Its provider/model save with this card; the Social Publishing view keeps its own profiles, destinations and enable toggle.
Image alt & captions (Image SEO, carries a Vision badge) — what Generate SEO with AI uses for alt text and captions. This is not SyteHero and not Modify with AI. Needs a model that accepts image input, so any provider that cannot take one is shown unselectable — see AI Providers for which those are.
Agent prompts — turns page-review notes into an implementation prompt for a coding agent.

Two more rows are status-only — a pill, a "Powers: …" line and a link, no controls here:

Lead scoring — shown only when the Leads module is active; links to its own page.
LinkCentral — shown only when the integration is on, as three rows (Cross-Link, Keyword, Context AI); links to its Enrichment Settings on System / API.

Each configurable row shows "Uses site default (Provider · Model)" when it has no provider of its own, with an Override toggle beside it — turn it on to pick a provider and model for that row alone, or leave it off to follow whatever the Site default provider on System / API resolves to. An Advanced disclosure under each row holds Max tokens, tunable independent of Override; choosing Custom in the model select lets you type a model ID by hand.

Image generation. A separate section below the rows above. These are billed per picture. Each appears only when its provider is available, so you may see one, both, or neither. Where your image service reports it, each model option here ends with a $-to-$$$$ price rating, with a short legend beside the picker explaining the scale.

Modify images with AI — the model, quality, detail preservation and strength used when a reviewer remakes a picture.
Listing image — the provider, repair model and seed used to repair a watermark on the cropped listing copy. The switch that turns that repair on stays with the rest of the listing-image settings, under Article images in the Images view.

These are the same provider and model settings used by those areas elsewhere in SyteOps. Changing them here updates the same underlying values.

Review & approval rules

Setting	What it controls
Who can publish	Any selected reviewer, or Author or designated approver only. Under the second option, co-reviewers cannot change the credited author (that would let them become the publisher).
Default publish type	Pre-selected type in the portal's publish picker.
Soft lock	Warns before concurrent edits.
Offer passkey sign-in	Adds a passkey option at sign-in. Password sign-in still works. Gray until Secure Passkeys is active; on by default once it is. See below.
Scheduled publishing	Allows a future publish date. When off, approvals publish immediately.
Keep removed pictures	How long a picture removed with Delete unused is kept before it is deleted for good (7, 14, 30, 60, 90, 180 or 365 days; default 30), or Do not keep (delete immediately). While it is kept, the picture is out of the media library, still works on the site, and can be restored from the article's Unused pictures card. A profile picture or theme logo removed with Delete image is held the same way when nothing else uses it; it is restored with Undo in the notice on that screen. The Removed pictures view in Content Pipelines lists everything being kept for the whole site and lets an administrator restore a picture or delete it before its time.
Review link expiry	How long the emailed review link stays valid (3, 7, 14, or 30 days; default 7). Re-send an expired link from the draft — the post is unaffected.
Default reviewers	Emailed and given edit access on every new draft, plus the author.
Default CC reviewers	Copied on the email as watchers — they can open the draft and comment on it, but not edit or publish it.

:::info What "Review link expiry" does and doesn't cover

Expiry protects the link, not the post. It stops an old email link from being opened by someone who is not signed in — a forwarded email, a link pasted into a chat, a shared inbox.

Anyone who is signed in to a WordPress account that's on the draft's reviewer list (and any administrator) can still open that draft after the window has passed, including from their review queue. Once a reviewer is signed in, their WordPress session is what proves who they are — the link is no longer doing that job.

So if you want to remove someone's access to a draft entirely, take them off the reviewer list or deactivate their WordPress account. Setting a shorter expiry won't do it on its own.

:::

Reviewers sign in to the portal with their WordPress account. If you have the Secure Passkeys plugin active, the portal's sign-in card shows a second button — Sign in with a passkey — beneath the usual one.

A passkey cannot be phished, guessed, or reused across sites, so it is the safer way in. Offering it here simply puts it in front of reviewers at the moment they are signing in.

The setting is Offer passkey sign-in, under SyteOps → Content Pipelines → Review Portal → Review & approval rules. It is grayed out until Secure Passkeys is active, and on by default once it is.

:::info Signing in with a password still works

This adds an option; it does not take one away. Reviewers who sign in with a password reach the portal and work exactly as before, and so does anyone on a device with no passkey support — the passkey button only appears where the browser can actually use one.

Because a password sign-in is still accepted, this is not a protection against a stolen or reused reviewer password. It makes the stronger method available and records which one was used; it does not block anybody. If you want passkeys enforced for signing in to WordPress, that is a Secure Passkeys setting rather than this one.

:::

The audit trail on each article records whether the person was signed in with a passkey, so you can tell at a glance how an edit or a publish was authenticated.

Editing permissions

Reviewer editing permissions default to full edit. Change a cell to restrict an area. A SyteOps Admin is never restricted; site administrators start with full access, then follow their role row and their per-person override.

How it works

Permissions are set by reviewer type (role). The panel shows a row for each role your site uses, plus an Everyone else (default) row that applies to anyone who doesn't match a more specific role — if a reviewer's user type has its own row in the table, that row's settings are used; the default row only applies to everyone else. For each row you can choose a restriction for each portal area. Every role row also offers — inherit — on each cell, meaning "use the default row's setting instead" — more on this further down.

Area	Restrictions available
Featured Image	Edit (full) or View only
Author	Edit (full) or View only
Permalink	Edit (full) or View only
SEO	Edit (full) or View only
GEO	Edit (full) or View only
Insert and edit links	Edit (full) or View only. View only leaves the toolbar buttons visible but disabled. Command/Ctrl-click still opens a link to test it.
Link suggestions	Edit (full), View only, or Hide. This column only appears when LinkCentral is installed and active. Hide removes the Links panel. View only shows it with Analyze, Apply, and Check disabled.
Reviewers	Allow (can add/remove reviewers) or Hide (reviewer panel not shown)
Modify with AI and image libraries	Allow or Hide (the whole Modify with AI block, picking a picture from an image library, and changing a picture from the page preview with Cmd/Ctrl+click). One permission covers all three. This column appears when SyteHero is installed and active, or when the Google Drive integration is on.
Unused pictures	Allow or Hide (the unused-pictures card, including Delete unused). Defaults to Allow.
Remix text with AI	Allow or Hide (the Remix with AI toolbar button). Defaults to Allow.
AI agent prompts	Allow or Hide (the AI agent prompts card on page and appearance reviews). Defaults to Hide. A SyteOps Admin always sees it; a site administrator sees it unless their role or per-person override hides it.
Share to menu	Allow or Hide (the Share to menu in the portal's top bar, in place of Copy link). Defaults to Hide. A SyteOps Admin always sees it; a site administrator sees it unless their role row or person override hides it. Hide keeps the plain Copy link menu, so copying the address is never lost.
Categories & tags	Edit and create new terms, Edit using existing terms only, or View only

Social sharing sits under the permissions table in the same card: one switch each for LinkedIn, Facebook, X, Instagram, Email and Text message, all off by default. A channel appears in the Review Portal's Copy link or Share to menu, the review queue rows and the personal page only while its switch is on, and Plain address is always offered. Facebook and X also open a dialog when on; LinkedIn does when your Management Server offers LinkedIn sign-in. A line under the LinkedIn switch says whether it does.

Request indexing sits under the Social sharing switches. Search Console property is either a domain property such as sc-domain:example.com or a URL-prefix property such as https://example.com/ (it must end with a slash); leave it blank to use your site's domain. Google account email is optional and opens Search Console as that account when you are signed in to several. A value that is not an email or a property in one of those shapes is not saved, and the save message names the field. Index status takes a Google service account key so the portal's SEO card can show whether Google has indexed a published page; Google must accept the key before it is saved, and Save key and Remove key act at once. Setup: Google index status.

Choosing View only makes the area visible in the portal but all controls are disabled so the reviewer can read but not change it. Choosing existing terms only for categories and tags lets reviewers choose from your site's existing terms but prevents them from creating new ones — the add-term field shows a suggestion list of matching existing terms.

Per-user overrides

Below the role rows there is a collapsible Per-user overrides section. This lets you grant or restrict individual team members differently from their role — useful if one person on a team should have extra access or a tighter restriction than everyone else in their role.

Who is never restricted

A SyteOps Admin always has full access, whatever the permissions matrix says.

A WordPress site administrator is treated differently. They start with full access, and the Everyone else (default) row does not apply to them. A role row that names them does, and so does their own per-person override. So if you hide Modify with AI and image libraries for one administrator, they no longer see it in the portal. An administrator with no role row and no per-person override keeps full access, exactly as before.

Site administrators can still open and edit every article, whether or not they are listed as a reviewer on it. The matrix only decides which areas they can change.

Every role row's cells have their own — inherit — option, the same as per-user overrides. A cell left at Inherit takes no position of its own for that role — it falls through to the Everyone else (default) row (and, if more than one of a reviewer's roles sets a real value for the same area, the most restrictive of those wins). Only a cell you deliberately change to Edit, View only, Allow, Hide, and so on is stored as a real setting for that role; leaving the rest at Inherit means saving the panel for an unrelated reason never locks a role into values nobody chose.

This does not undo a role that was already saved before Inherit existed. A role saved even once under the old behavior already has a real, stored value for every area — including AI agent prompts at Hide, its pre-selected value at the time. Saving that role's row again without touching a cell keeps whatever is already stored; it does not retroactively switch anything back to Inherit. If you want an administrator or reviewer in an already-saved role to see AI agent prompts (or change any other area), open that role's cell and choose the value directly — or choose — inherit — to release it back to the default row.

Choosing View only for SEO removes the Description item from the pre-publish checklist for whoever it applies to, administrators included — the same as for any other reviewer. View only for GEO does not: GEO Analysis, GEO Analysis Is Current and AI Answers Reviewed all stay on the checklist and BLOCK publishing, with a note that someone who can edit GEO needs to finish them — they no longer quietly drop off the list the way the SEO item does. This applies to anyone restricted this way, administrators included, and is unchanged from before Inherit existed: it is not a side effect of role inheritance, it is what View only for GEO has always meant for the publish checklist.

Saving changes

Click Save settings at the bottom of the panel to apply your changes. The new permissions take effect the next time a reviewer opens or refreshes a portal link.

Each person's private review page

Every team member mapped to a WordPress account gets their own private link to their review queue. Find it on the Users tab (or the Roles & Users page), open a person's card, and switch to the Links subtab — a row called Private review page shows their link next to a Copy button.

Signing in is still required. The link identifies which person's queue to open; it isn't a password. On a site that uses Wordfence, signing in from this link does skip Wordfence's extra sign-in check, so keep the link private and Regenerate it if it leaks. Opening it while signed out asks that person to sign in first, and opening it while signed in as someone else refuses and offers to switch accounts. Only that person's own WordPress account can ever see their own queue this way.
Team members without a linked WordPress account don't have one yet. The row explains this and offers no link until you associate the person with a WordPress account on the User IDs subtab.
Regenerate replaces it. A Regenerate button next to Copy is available to site administrators. Use it if a link may have been shared somewhere it shouldn't have been. The moment you regenerate, the old link stops working completely — even a copy already sitting in someone's inbox — so only share the new one with that person.
You only see the links you're allowed to. A site administrator sees every team member's link here. Anyone else who can reach this page only ever sees their own.

Opening your own private page shows more than your queue. The header logo opens the WordPress Dashboard in a new tab. Member since uses a month-day-year date (for example, May 12, 2026). An Edit details card lets you update your own name, company, phone number and email addresses, your booking and LinkedIn links, and — if you're already able to add files to the Media Library — your photo, including whether it can be used as a Model photo elsewhere on the site. A summary shows what's currently on file; click Edit details to change it. Whatever you save here changes only your own record.

The same card carries two notification switches: Reminder emails (nudges before something you're on is due to go live) and Reply notifications (notes left on the items you are on, and replies to your own notes). Both are on by default. Turning either off takes effect starting with the next email of that kind — it doesn't cancel anything already on its way. Every review email's footer carries a Why you got this: Email settings link that opens this exact card on your own private page, so you never have to go hunting for it.

The last row of that summary is Your private link — the link to this page, with a Copy button beside it. Open Your details to see it. There is no Regenerate button here: replacing a link stays with site administrators on the Users tab.

Open the portal for any post

You don't have to wait for a draft from your content source to use the portal. There are three ways in:

From the posts list. In the WordPress Posts list, hover over any post you can edit and click the Review Content link in its row of actions. For Posts and any content type your pipelines publish into, you also get Review Appearance for the themed site preview. In the Pages list the row action is Review Appearance. A draft that already has a publishing time shows that moment in the Date column as Planned (you chose it) or Slot held (cadence reserved it). Quick Edit adds a read-only Publishes line for the same moment — WordPress Date on a draft is still last modified, not that publishing time.
From the post itself. While editing a post or a pipeline-target content type in the classic editor, the area above the editor offers Open Review Content (the editor) and Open Review Appearance (the themed preview). In the block editor, those same links sit in the Status & visibility panel, and the toolbar still offers them. While editing a page, only Open Review Content appears — it opens the themed preview.
From the review editor. For a post (not a page), use Review Appearance in the top bar to open the themed preview.
From Review Appearance. When you are in the themed preview for a post (not a page), use Review Content in the top bar to jump back to the full review editor.
From the live article. While signed in and reading a published post on your own site, the toolbar offers both Open Review Content and Open Review Appearance. On a page, only Open Review Content appears.

:::tip Can't see the toolbar while editing? The WordPress editor's fullscreen mode hides the toolbar. Use Open Review Content in the Status & visibility panel (block editor), the area above the editor (classic editor), or the posts-list row action. :::

Any of them issues a fresh secure link for that post and opens the portal in a new tab — the same review window contributors see, with the same expiry window as an emailed link. This lets you put an existing post (or one written by hand) through the same review-and-approve flow.

The Review Content action appears on posts and on any other content type your content sources publish into. Review Appearance is offered for those same types and for Pages. Unrelated content types added by other plugins do not get either action.

Content Pipelines — The feature that drives content ingest and post-publish processing.
Content Sources — How external content apps deliver articles into the Review Portal.

Step 1: You receive a review email​

Step 2: Open the secure editor and sign in​

Step 3: Review and edit the draft​

A long sidebar wraps under the preview​

Pack cards into gaps​

Review how it looks on the site​

Core article fields​

Formatting and links​

Featured Image​

Author​

Images inside the article​

Changing an image with AI​

Using a Model​

Choosing between versions​

Notes on an image​

Sending the notes to somebody​

SEO — keyword and meta description​

GEO — AI search and answer engine visibility​

Links​

Categories and tags​

Setting a time without publishing yet​

Changing or cancelling a schedule​

Before you can publish​

Step 4: Send to a Colleague (optional)​

Commenting on someone else's review​

Step 5: Request changes​

Step 6: Use the content calendar​

Articles holding a publishing slot​

Cadence warnings​

On a phone or tablet​

Your review queue​

Filtering the queue​

Watching​

Coming Up​

Notes & Replies for You​

Published Content​

Taking a live article back to draft​

Who receives the review email​

When you change these lists​

Email notifications​

Batched emails and the batch window​

One email per person​

Review Portal settings (for site owners)​

Branding​

Article images​

Pre-publish requirements​

AI Models​

Review & approval rules​

Offering passkey sign-in​

Editing permissions​

Each person's private review page​

Open the portal for any post​

Related pages​