Letting AI draft WordPress articles without auto-publishing: an approval workflow

Always stop and wait for approval

When you let AI draft articles, the basic safeguard against publishing a wrong draft is to always place human approval between generation and publication.

Rootpublish is a plugin that prepares articles and update proposals from information about your company and services, for review and approval in WordPress. A draft submitted by AI is not published on its own. It is saved as awaiting approval, and a person with publishing rights checks the text and its sources before deciding whether to publish.

Approve your firsthand information first

What you prepare first is not the instruction to the AI but the company information that serves as the article's evidence. Rootpublish stores the text, source and verification status of each piece of company information. Unverified and private information is not used as evidence for articles. Information you want to use as evidence must be approved before you request a draft.

For how to record it, the Rootpublish editorial guide suggests the following. Separate facts from interpretation, and record the date, conditions, source and publication scope. For a case study, organize the client's problem, the action taken, the result, the measurement conditions, who can confirm it and what may be published, and do not fill unverified items with guesses. This is an editorial suggestion, not a measured result showing improved search rankings.

Company information is classified as mission, vision, values, concept, members, case studies, services and other. Missions and values express purposes and criteria for judgment; they are not evidence of results. Another principle is not to infer authorship, editorial review or qualifications from member information. Registering information with these categories in mind makes it easier, during review, to spot places where a company's principles are written as if they were achievements.

Choose one reader question before requesting a draft

The editorial guide suggests narrowing the request to one reader question and selecting only the information relevant to it. Rootpublish's editorial principles also call for choosing the information relevant to the article rather than supplying all company information.

Deciding the question first is also consistent with Google's guidance. Google asks for a focus on accuracy, quality and relevance when content is created with generative AI, and explains that mass generation that adds no value for users may violate its spam policies. Deciding at the request stage whose question you answer keeps adding pages from becoming the goal in itself.

Generate with your own AI

Rootpublish receives drafts from the user's own AI API or a supported MCP host. API usage fees are paid directly to the AI provider.

MCP is a connection method used only while the AI is running. Connecting it does not make a stopped AI produce articles on a schedule. Do not plan your operations on the assumption that articles will be added automatically once it is connected. With either method, submitted drafts are saved as awaiting approval.

Company information, article proposals and approval history are stored in the user's WordPress. Company information and proposals can also be exported.

Check the text against its evidence paragraph by paragraph

Rootpublish records the ID and version of the information each paragraph of a draft refers to. At approval, it checks whether the original information has changed. The versions of the classified company information and the editorial policy are also checked.

However, a version check only shows whether the original information has changed. It does not guarantee that the text matches its evidence in meaning. That comparison is the approver's job.

The editorial guide suggests checking, for each claim, its correspondence with the evidence, figures and conditions, publication scope and the reader's next step. In practice, open the information for the ID recorded on a paragraph and compare it with the text. For example, check that figures match the evidence, that conditions and limitations in the evidence have not been dropped, and that no results or guarantees absent from the evidence have been added.

For existing posts, also check what changes

For existing posts, check how the post title, body and publication status will change. Rootpublish does not write to meta fields dedicated to SEO plugins. However, templates that build the SEO title or description from the post title or body may produce different output when the post changes.

In the editorial team's proposed rollout, you first approve and apply a single article in a test environment, then compare the HTML received while logged out with the SEO settings screen. If there is a problem, revert the change to that article and check the SEO, theme and cache settings separately.

Articles containing images, links, tables or custom blocks are excluded from automatic updates to preserve their structure. They need to be edited manually in WordPress.

People decide on publication, and results are judged by measurement

After the check, a person with publishing rights decides whether to publish. Rootpublish does not guarantee search rankings or citations by AI. For search improvements, it is designed so that after one improvement is approved and published, the same page is observed for seven days and judged on measured results.

When deciding on publication, use as criteria whether the article answers the reader's question accurately and whether the conditions in the evidence remain in the text.