Turning a gap into a content brief

A content gap recommendation is already most of a brief: it has a working title, the action to take, a suggested outline, the queries the content must answer, and target pages when it’s an optimization. This playbook walks the path from finding a gap to a reviewed draft, using a scenario. Scenario: you sell project management software, and the prompt “how to run a sprint retrospective” scores 22% coverage. AI answers it daily; your site doesn’t.

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1. Pick the gap worth closing

Open Content Gap and sort your attention by two things the prompt row already shows: a low coverage score and a prompt you actually want to win. Click the row to open the gap report. Read the AI Search Summary first, then check whether the recommendations are Create or Optimize: Create means no matching page exists, Optimize means a page exists but doesn’t cover the fanout queries, and those are different jobs.

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2. Choose the recommendation, not just the prompt

One gap report usually carries several recommendations. Each is either Create or Optimize; you tell them apart by the button, Run content agent or Optimize page. Each also carries an impact rating (high, medium, low) and an effort rating (quick win, moderate, significant). Pick by return on effort: a high-impact quick win beats a high-impact significant project when both close gaps on the same prompt. In our scenario, the report recommends creating a “Sprint retrospective guide” (high impact, moderate effort).

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3. Expand it and sanity-check the brief

Expand the recommendation card. You get the suggested outline, the related queries it should answer, and for Optimize actions, the target pages. This is your brief review moment: check the outline against what you know about your audience, because the agent derived it from what AI models searched for, not from your positioning. If a section doesn’t fit your brand, you will fix it at the review stage, but knowing now saves a cycle.

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4. Hand it to the Content Agent

Click the button on the recommendation:

• Run content agent (on Create recommendations) opens the generation dialog with the content type prefilled and the recommendation attached as context; its title and details are shown on a card, not copied into the brief fields. The agent drafts the piece, and you land on the document in Create Content. See Create Content.
• Optimize page (on Optimize recommendations) opens the optimization dialog with the target page URL already set, and the result lands in Optimize Content. See Optimize content.

The draft stays linked to the recommendation. Back on the gap report, the recommendation shows its linked documents, so next quarter you can see which gaps you already acted on instead of re-briefing them.

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5. Or let the schedule do the picking

If you run the Content Agent with a content schedule, you don’t have to walk steps 1-4 by hand: the planning agent pulls Create recommendations (not Optimize) into the calendar as scheduled pieces. Setup defaults to auto-publish, so switch the mode to Review first if you want every draft in your review inbox before anything publishes. Automation then changes who picks the next gap, not who approves the content. See Content schedule and Reviewing drafts.

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6. Review, publish, then close the loop

Review the draft as usual (your Knowledge base keeps it on-brand), publish it, and make sure the new URL lands in your sitemap; the analysis can only credit pages it can index. Coverage does not refresh the moment the URL is live: prompts are re-analyzed about every 30 days, or use Refresh content gap after the new sitemap URLs are crawled (7-day cooldown). The real success signal comes later and elsewhere: the prompt’s responses start citing your new page.