Build a content brief with AI that a writer can use
Generated briefs are usually a keyword list with headings. A usable brief answers different questions.
Before you start
- A topic and an audience
- Access to the top-ranking pages
What you will be able to do
- Use AI for the research half and keep the judgement half
- Write the angle and the claim yourself, because nothing else can
- Give a writer a brief they do not have to reverse-engineer
Ask a model for a content brief and you get an outline, a keyword list, and a word count. A writer receiving that still has every real decision left to make.
The parts a model can do well are worth having. They are just not the parts most brief templates ask for.
Have it summarise what already ranks
Coverage and structure across the top results — genuinely tedious, genuinely automatable.
Feed it the top handful of ranking pages and ask what each covers, how each is structured, and what all of them assume the reader already knows.
This is real work done well: it is summarisation over supplied text, which is where models are strongest. Doing it by hand takes an hour and produces the same list.
Ask what they all leave out
The gap is the only interesting output of a competitive analysis.
With the same pages in context, ask what questions a reader would still have afterwards, and what none of them address.
Some of the answers will be things nobody covers because they do not matter. A few will be the reason to write the piece at all — and those are much easier to spot from a list than from reading five articles yourself.
Write the angle and the claim yourself
What is this piece arguing, and why us? A model cannot know either.
Two sentences you write by hand: what this piece argues, and why your organisation is the one to argue it — the data you have, the experience you can cite, the position you are willing to take.
A generated angle is an average of existing angles, which is exactly the piece nobody needs. This is the section that makes the brief worth writing.
- Accepting a generated "unique angle". It will be a recombination of the sources you supplied, and it will read like one.
Attach the evidence, not just the outline
The figures, quotes and examples — verified, with sources.
Give the writer the specific material: three statistics with links, an internal example, a customer quote. Verify each yourself.
A brief with an outline and no evidence makes the writer do the research again. A brief with verified evidence and a loose outline gets a better piece back, faster.
Let it gather; you decide. Angle, claim and evidence are the brief — the outline is the least valuable part of the document.
Common questions
Was this guide useful?
88% of readers found this useful
Read next
Write ad variants and test them properly
AI removes the cost of writing variants, which makes it very easy to run tests that cannot teach you anything. The discipline is i…
Find keyword gaps with AI without inventing search volume
Ask an AI for search volumes and it will give you confident numbers that are entirely fabricated. Used for ideas instead of data,…
Choose your first AI assistant without overthinking it
Every comparison table lists twenty differences and only three of them change your day. Here is how to pick in ten minutes and get…
Edit AI drafts so they stop sounding like drafts
Readers cannot always name what makes text feel machine-written, but they notice. These are the specific tics, and most of them ar…
