Writing Assistant FAQs

If you are just using ChatGPT (or similar consumer AI content tools) for your content creation, you are missing out on the precision, depth, and advanced AI engineering that Conductor has developed in Writing Assistant. AI-generation in Writing Assistant sets itself apart from other tools through several key features and approaches:

Enterprise-grade foundation

Conductor's Writing Assistant is built on top of OpenAI's enterprise API integration designed for:

• High-volume usage without limitations on model access or usage caps, which helps ensure reliability and avoids downtime caused by usage.
• Security and privacy. Your content will never be used to train our models or OpenAI's. Popular free tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini do use your inputs to train their models, risking the exposure of your organization's data and intellectual property.
• Your specific workflows. Conductor's Writing Assistant has been purpose-built to generate content infused with insights from top-ranking pages and website optimization best practices. Our engineers have spent hundreds of hours fine-tuning the code that each request uses to generate a draft in Writing Assistant.

SEO at the heart of AI-generated output—all in real time

Writing Assistant uses RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) to enhance the content it generates with deep SEO insights, and to provide content that is not only high-quality but also strategically aligned with your search performance goals. Gathering insights in real time from the top-ranking pages for the topic you are writing about—and then generating content based on those insights—Writing Assistant ensures that the content is relevant and optimized for your audience and for search engines.

Customization and brand alignment

Writing Assistant allows for customization of tone, style, and terminology, ensuring that the generated content aligns with the brand's voice and marketing objectives. Customize the guidance associated with the insights gathered from top-ranking pages before generating your drafts to fine-tune Writing Assistant for the best content.

Conductor currently uses OpenAI’s API to generate insights and recommendations about the content you enter into Writing Assistant. OpenAI does not use the information you enter to train their AI models, and Conductor does not share it outside of the Writing Assistant feature and its use of the OpenAI API.

You might have heard that OpenAI's ChatGPT product does use the content users enter in its interface to train its models. This is true! We want to clarify that while we use OpenAI to power Writing Assistant's AI features, it is not OpenAI's ChatGPT product, but their API. You can learn more about their privacy commitments in their API data usage policy.

We believe AI—when incorporated thoughtfully—is a strategic advantage for creating effective, brand-aligned content at scale, fully aligned with Google's emphasis on quality.

Google does not penalize content simply because AI was part of the creation process. Google values content that is original, valuable, and truly helpful to users. Think of it this way: Google rewards content that demonstrates Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-E-A-T). Whether that content is written by a human, with AI assistance, or generated by AI, quality is the key. The real risk is publishing low-quality, generic content—and that can happen with or without AI.

Conductor designed our AI features to help you overcome those common concerns and create content that:

• Is high-quality and performance-driven.
• Has realtime relevance, using our RAG-enhanced AI models.
• Reflects the very things Google values: your unique human expertise, experience, and perspective.

No. However, the AI-enhanced People Also Ask insight might not load results for long pieces of content. To avoid this issue, try to keep content in the editor around 3,000 words.

Currently, any user type in Conductor can create and edit drafts on Writing Assistant.

Researching one keyword at a time can provide a limited view of the actual landscape—SERPs vary greatly according to keyword variants and closely related keywords. Even though you might care about ranking for one primary keyword for a page (maybe based on monthly search volume), the reality of search today is that topics are more meaningful than keywords for meeting customer intent. By querying multiple keywords at once, these topics can be researched in Writing Assistant more holistically.

We do our best to mimic the content on your page and present it in a way that is useful. Because the way our customers structure their websites can vary so widely, this means there are times when what appears doesn’t always capture the experience on the page.

You can use the Main page content not appearing? link above the text editor to re-import the content in a way that might improve the way the content appears in the editor.

If this alternate method still does not import the content in a way that's useful for your needs, you can always copy and paste content from your page into the text editor.

The Content Types insight suggests the type of content most likely to be ranking highly in search, based on its review of the currently top-ranking content. Here are the potential content types that it chooses from:

Product/Service Page

A detailed webpage that showcases the features, benefits, and specifications of a specific product or service.

Landing Page

A focused webpage designed to convert visitors into leads or customers by highlighting a particular offer or call-to-action.

Education/Information

Content that provides valuable insights, explanations, or background on a specific topic to inform and educate the audience.

How-to Guide

A step-by-step instructional piece that teaches readers how to accomplish a specific task or solve a problem.

Blog Post

A regularly updated article that shares thoughts, opinions, or information on a particular subject, often in a conversational tone.

List-based Article

A structured piece of content that presents information in an easily digestible numbered or bulleted format.

News

Timely content that reports on current events, recent developments, or breaking stories relevant to your industry or audience.

Event

A promotional piece that provides details about an upcoming occasion, including date, time, location, and other relevant information.

FAQ

A compilation of common questions and their corresponding answers, designed to address user queries efficiently.

Local Page

A webpage tailored to a specific geographic location, featuring information about local services, products, or business details to attract and engage customers in that area.

In the event there are many different types of content ranking well for a topic, the Content Types insight will still return the content type that is the closest fit based on the patterns it detects across the top-ranking content.

Writing Assistant no longer checks for exact keyword phrases and instead uses AI to understand the meaning and topic of your content. Modern search engines prioritize content that thoroughly addresses user intent and covers a topic comprehensively—not just content that contains specific keywords. This approach provides smarter recommendations that align with how search engines actually work, helping you create higher-quality, more effective content that's ready for AI-driven search.

Conductor sources pages from Conductor Intelligence through:

• Your integrated web analytics.
• Your pages ranking for your tracked keywords.
• Any preferred URLs you have configured for a tracked keyword.

This means that there may be no suggestions for highlighted content if you haven't integrated analytics or tracked keywords—or if data has not yet been published for them. Be sure to integrate analytics and track keywords in Conductor Intelligence as soon as possible for new accounts to take advantage of this feature.

Writing Assistant relies on semantic understanding to determine the links we suggest; and semantic understanding is the foundation for how we decide what pages on your site are about. Here's a quick description of what we do to determine semantic understanding and how we decide what links to provide in our internal link suggestions.

Creating embeddings from source content

First, Conductor reviews the content on your website (see above for how we source it). With this content, our AI engine reviews the meaning and context of each page using an AI technique called "embeddings" to create a semantic understanding of the content. This semantic understanding enables Writing Assistant to not simply match keywords between your draft and other pages on your site, but actually match your draft's content with content that is about similar concepts.

When these embeddings are created, we store them in what is called a "vector database", which is like a map of your content's meaning that captures the relationships between topics and concepts.

Searching your content for matches to drafted anchor text

When you ask for internal link suggestions, Writing Assistant's AI engine analyzes your draft (or your highlighted selection) to identify potential anchor text for internal links based on linking best practices. For each potential link, Conductor performs a semantic search of the vector database we created from your content. This search looks for pages whose meaning is most clearly related to the meaning of the anchor text.

Providing link suggestions

After reviewing pages for their relationship to the identified anchor text, Writing Assistant takes the relevant pages and filters them to include only potential links that meet certain criteria:

• Relevance threshold. Writing Assistant will only suggest pages that meet a certain level of relevance. The AI will not suggest any links if no pages meet this threshold.
• Same URL. Writing Assistant will not suggest a self-referencing link.
• Duplicate links. Writing Assistant will not suggest the same page as a link more than once in your draft.
• User-entered criteria. Writing Assistant will review the user's URL conditions for suggestions, if any were entered.
• Language and region matching. Where it can determine a language and region associated with the draft and reviewed site content, Writing Assistant will attempt to only suggest links that match language and region.

Typically, you would use Content Guidance during your research phase to gather insights and recommendations for content optimization, while you would use Writing Assistant during the content creation and editing phase to implement those insights and ensure the content is optimized in real-time.

When participating in Conductor’s content score alpha program, you can expect that your average scores will change as compared to the previous version of our content score. 

We have fully reimagined the the scoring factors to be more representative of what strong content should look like in the age of AI. Instead of looking primarily at keyword inclusion, the new score provides more comprehensive insight on intent alignment and topic coverage. 

During the alpha program, we plan to continuously release new score factors to help you improve your content even further—which may include things like alignment with content profile and originality factors. As a result, this means your new scores:

• Are subject to change over time, even if you haven't made updates to the content.
• Are likely to be lower than the previous scoring methodology, since we are now grading on more factors.

Scores may be classified as Excellent, Moderate, or Needs Work—across the following ranges:

• Excellent: 67 and higher
• Moderate: 34–66
• Needs Work: 33 and lower

In terms of guidance for how to interpret your score, naturally, the decision to publish a piece of content or not is very context-dependent, but we think:

• 80 and up: Probably a good directional target for "publication-ready". The higher the better!
• Between 60 and 80: Most "adequate" content would land here. That is, you've done a decent job across all the score factors—nothing stands out, but nothing is bad.
• Below 60:  Consider spending some time iterating on your draft, using our tools and your expertise.

You can use the insights shown in Writing Assistant to tailor your content to cover address what Conductor suggests.

However, because Conductor generates your content score based on those insights (among other factors), you may also customize your insights to make sure that they are relevant to the goals you want your content to achieve.

For example, if there are Questions to Answer insights that suggest answering questions that you know are not relevant to your page, customize that insight to remove the irrelevant questions.

Good point! However, we think there's a subtle but important difference between "keyword counting" (we don't want to base our score on this) and "term inclusion":

• Term inclusion is about topic coverage; if you're focused on providing helpful information for this topic, these are the terms that should be naturally relevant. Keyword counting is about trying to signal "this is what my page is about" to search engines instead of focusing on what your audience needs from your content.
• Term inclusion is also an important aspect of governance in content. For example, it lets you establish clear standards for what must be included for a piece to be publication ready. 

Additionally, the qualitative nature of the other factors in Content Score provides for "checks and balances".
You cannot get a good, overall score just by using all the body copy suggestions. If you're not doing a good job of answering questions, addressing subtopics, aligning with audience, objective, and journey stage, you might have 100% score for body copy suggestions, but a low score overall.

We are working on refining this score to also include qualitative elements. In the future, Conductor will not simply identify whether you included the terms or not, but instead identify whether you included the terms and used them in natural ways that provide helpful information for your audience. This will help combat any potential downsides from writers "shoehorning" terms into their pieces to get a better score—when they should use them to better address their audiences' needs.

You can learn a number of things from Body Copy insights. The topics you cover in your body copy should speak to your audience's interests. But with all the topics, subtopics, and related ideas you could potentially address on one page, it's hard to know how to choose what topics to cover and what words should appear to resonate best with your audience.

Body copy insights helps you identify the terms that successful pages already use—and how often they're used—to give your page the best chance to compete.

Important Terms

Body copy insights show you a list of frequently-mentioned terms that appear on top-ranking pages for your topic of focus. These reflect the keywords that most of the top 15 ranking pages for your target topic use.

In Writing Assistant, you'll see:

• An indication of the number of ranking pages that use each suggested keyword.
• An indication of whether the draft content in the editor includes the suggested keyword.

Toggle to See Secondary and Additional Terms

You can also choose to see Secondary keywords, which reflect keywords that many (but not all) of your SEO competitors use in their pages ranking for your target topic. They are semantically relevant, but not as relevant as the Important keywords.

Finally, you can choose to see Additional keywords, which reflect keywords that some of your SEO competitors use in their pages ranking for your target topic. They are semantically associated with your target topic, but they may not be directly relevant.

Readability helps you understand the complexity of the content on a page using Conductor's measure for how easily an average reader can read a page in US english. We analyze the number of words, syllables, and sentences used on a page to apply the Flesch-Kincaid formula for readability in calculating this score.

You'll want your content readability to appropriately target the reading level of your topic audience. In general target a readability grade level of 8th - 9th grade to be easily understood by most English-language readers.

As you create a draft, you can add up to five references to help guide Conductor's AI engine as it generates content.

You can add plain text, or any of the following file-types:

• .pdf
• .docx
• .xlsx
• .txt
• .csv
• .md

The maximum file size for any of these file types references is 5MB.