Decide what to write about

The hardest part of running a blog is not writing the posts. It is knowing which posts to write. This page is a method you can hand to your agent, not a theory of content marketing.

Start from questions your customers already ask

The posts that earn search traffic and get quoted by assistants answer a specific question completely. So the unit of planning is a question, not a topic.

You already have a supply of them:

• Support conversations, sales calls, and onboarding sessions. Any question you have answered twice is a post.
• The queries that already bring people to your site. Google Search Console, Performance, Queries.
• What people ask about your category in public. Reddit threads, competitor comparison pages, and the "People also ask" box.
• Your own product decisions. The reasoning behind a choice you made is often the most useful thing you can publish, and nobody else can write it.

Write the question down in the words a person would actually type. "Do AI crawlers run JavaScript?" is a post. "AI crawler considerations" is not.

Group them into clusters

A cluster is one broad page plus several narrow ones, all linking to each other. Search engines and retrieval systems both use those links to work out what your site is about, and a group of connected posts on one subject reads as expertise in a way that ten unconnected posts does not.

In AgentBlog a cluster maps onto a category. Each entry in content/categories.json gets an indexable hub page at /blog/category/<slug>, so the category description is real copy that ranks, not a label.

[
  {
    "slug": "ai-search",
    "name": "AI search",
    "description": "How ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity find, read, and cite web pages, and what that means for how you publish."
  }
]

A workable first shape is two or three categories, each with one broad post and three to five narrow ones. More categories than that on a young blog splits your internal links across pages that have none to spare.

Tags are for cross-cutting themes rather than structure. Tag pages are noindex below a configurable post count, because a tag page with two posts on it is a thin page competing with your real ones.

Ask your agent to plan, not just to write

Your agent has your existing posts, your categories, and your config in context, which makes it a better planner than a blank page.

Read content/blog and content/categories.json.
Propose eight posts for the ai-search cluster that we have not written yet.
For each one give the exact question it answers, who it is for, which existing
posts should link to it, and which existing post it should link to.
Rank them by how likely they are to be searched by someone
who could buy our product.

That last clause matters more than volume. A question with 200 searches a month from people evaluating a purchase is worth more than one with 20,000 searches from people who will never buy.

Publish in an order that compounds

Write the broad post in a cluster first, then the narrow ones, then go back and link the broad one to each of them. Every new post should get at least one inbound link from an existing post in the same commit that adds it. A post nothing links to is discovered only through your sitemap and inherits none of the context around it.

Orphan posts are the most common structural failure on a blog that otherwise does everything right.

Refresh what already works

New posts are not the only lever, and often not the best one. A post that already ranks and is now slightly wrong is the cheapest win available.

npx agentblog@latest audit --stale

That lists posts by how overdue a refresh is, ranked by how many internal links point at them, so the top of the list is where a refresh pays back most. Then:

Refresh content/blog/<slug>.mdx using the refresh-blog-post skill.

The agent re-fetches every source, corrects what actually changed, and leaves dateModified alone if nothing did. See writing with your agent for why that discipline matters.

A reasonable cadence for a small team is one new post and one refresh per week. Two posts a week that nobody links to is worse than one post a week inside a cluster.

Build the entity, not only the pages

An assistant that quotes you has to resolve "who published this" to something real. Three things help, and none of them is a blog post:

• brand.sameAs in your config, pointing at profiles a third party can verify: LinkedIn, GitHub, Crunchbase, YouTube, Wikidata.
• A real author with a real bio and their own sameAs links, in content/authors.json. One named author with a filled-in profile beats three empty ones.
• Being discussed somewhere you do not control. Off-site mentions correlate more strongly with AI visibility than raw backlink counts do. The measurements behind that claim, and their limits, are in the GEO playbook.

Know what "working" looks like

Two numbers, checked monthly.

Impressions per cluster in Search Console, filtered by URL path. A cluster that is working shows impressions climbing before clicks do.

Assistant referrals, which do not group with search traffic in any default report. lib/ai-referrers.ts classifies them for you. See measuring AI traffic.

Give a new cluster three months before you judge it. Give an individual post six weeks before you decide it failed, then refresh it rather than deleting it.