Documentation
Keeping articles fresh: refreshes, optimisations, merges and takedowns
Refresh articles that lose clicks, optimise pages with a weak click-through rate, merge duplicates with a 301 and take articles down in the content engine.
Published articles keep being measured in Search Console. Once a day the engine looks for articles that are losing clicks and for articles on the first two pages of results with a weak click-through rate, and queues a refresh or an optimisation for them. You can also take an article down, publish it again, roll it back to an earlier revision, or merge it into another page with a 301. List pages rebuild themselves.
Refresh and optimise tasks
The daily run at 03:17 UTC checks each property that has Search Console connected and New articles per week above 0. A property gets new maintenance tasks at most once a week: up to three refreshes and three optimisations each time.
| Task | Queued when, over the last 28 days | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
| Refresh | The article had at least 20 clicks in the 28 days before, and now has 60% of that or less, a fall of 40% or more | Bring the article up to date. The articles that lost the most clicks go first |
| Optimise | Its average position is between 8 and 20, with at least 30 impressions, and its click-through rate is under 60% of what that position usually gets | Sharpen the title, the meta description and the direct answer |
Only articles AutoPSEO manages are checked: its own and the ones it took over from your site. An article must be at least 45 days past its publication or last revision and have no other open task. All languages of a page count together, and positions are weighted by impressions. The expected click-through rate per position comes from a market-wide curve, the same idea as the CTR Benchmark report. For why these signals matter, see fixing content decay and CTR recovery.
Questions the topic review folded into an existing article arrive as optimise tasks too, up to five questions per task. Your site can also flag articles for a refresh or an optimisation in its export (delivery).
How the tasks are written
Refresh and optimise tasks join the queue and share the writer's pace. A refresh uses one article from the monthly quota and an optimisation uses one optimisation (quota).
AutoPSEO's writer answers either kind by writing a new revision of the whole article from a fresh brief on the article's search. The page keeps its address, type and publication date. Your own AI over MCP receives the task's reason and can read the live text with content_get_page, so it can change only what needs changing (your own AI).
Before a refresh or optimisation is written, AutoPSEO reads the article again from your site when your site can export it. An edit made on your site is kept as a revision of its own, and the update that follows is based on your current version, so your site can tell whether it still applies (delivery).
Take an article down
In Published, choose Take down ("Take this article down? It can be published again later from its revisions."). Your own AI can do the same with content_unpublish, a tool that tells it to act only with your go-ahead. The article stops being served, your site receives article.unpublished, and AutoPSEO's own hosted address answers 410 Gone. Taken-down articles are listed under Taken down with Publish again, which puts the last live revision back; your site receives it as article.updated.
An article AutoPSEO took down never comes back through an import from your site, even while your site still lists it.
Roll back to an earlier revision
Every revision is kept. A revision that was live before can be put back with content_publish and the article's id and revision number over MCP; there is no rollback button on the Content page. Merged articles and list pages cannot be rolled back.
Merge two pages that answer the same search
When two pages compete for the same searches (see cannibalisation), merge the weaker AutoPSEO article into the stronger page with content_merge over MCP. The target is another live AutoPSEO article, or any address on your own site.
- The article is taken down and remembers where it was merged.
- Its open tasks are turned down with "The article was merged into" and the address.
- Your site receives
article.unpublishedwithredirectTo, and should answer the old address with a 301 there. AutoPSEO's hosted address does the same. - From then on, topics about the merged article count as covered by the target.
A merge is final: a merged article cannot be rolled back, published again or merged a second time. Only articles that were published can be merged, never into themselves and never into another host. Google's guidance on redirects explains why a permanent redirect is the right signal.
List pages stay up to date by themselves
A list page gathers items from other pages, for example every sample question for one role (typed pages). Every five minutes AutoPSEO checks, per property, whether a page a list draws from has a new live revision, and rebuilds the stale lists at most once every ten minutes. A rebuild is published straight away: no model, no review and no quota. When the items come out the same, nothing is sent to your site. When no live page carries the list's value any more, the list page is taken down.
List pages cannot be claimed, rewritten, rolled back, taken down or merged by hand; they change only when the pages they gather do.