How to review an AI-written blog post before you publish

Start with the reader's decision

Before correcting sentences, write down the question the article should answer and the person asking it. A shop owner deciding how often to update product guides needs different advice from an editor building a daily news operation. If those audiences are mixed together, fluent prose will not repair the missing focus. Define the reader's starting point, the decision they face, and what they should be able to do after reading.

Then read the draft without looking at its headline. Does the opening identify that problem? Do the sections move toward a useful answer? A broad introduction about a rapidly changing digital world often consumes space without helping anyone. Replace it with the concrete situation, a direct answer, and the conditions that could change that answer.

Google's guidance asks publishers to create content that is useful to people and to consider whether it adds original value. Treat that as an editorial question: what does this article contribute beyond the pages it cites? A useful contribution can be a worked example, a decision checklist, a comparison with clear criteria, or a documented lesson from your own process.

Check claims rather than counting citations

Make a short list of statements that could change a reader's decision: prices, product limits, release dates, legal requirements, performance figures, and instructions that could cause someone to lose work. Open the underlying source for each one. Check the exact product, version, date, and conditions involved. A citation next to a paragraph is only useful if the linked page supports the specific claim being made.

Prefer the organization responsible for the information when possible. Product documentation is usually a better source for a feature limit than a comparison article that may have copied an older number. For an interpretation or a disputed question, seek more than one credible perspective and explain the disagreement. Remove unsupported precision instead of turning a guess into a confident statistic.

Google explicitly notes that generative AI can produce inaccurate information and advises attention to accuracy, quality, and relevance. Build this check into the workflow before publication. If a source is inaccessible, find another reliable source or rewrite the claim so it only says what you can verify. Do not leave a broken reference as a signal of research that readers cannot inspect.

• Confirm that each source supports the adjacent claim.
• Record when time-sensitive information was checked.
• Separate established facts from your own interpretation.

Add the missing practical detail

An article can be accurate and still offer little help. Look for advice such as choose the right tool, understand your audience, or optimize your workflow. Each phrase needs a decision rule or an example. For a small team, choosing the right tool might mean checking whether two people can review a draft, whether revisions are recoverable, and whether the publishing destination is supported.

Use an example you can stand behind. A hypothetical example is useful when it is clearly labeled as hypothetical; it should not become an invented customer story or a fabricated result. If you describe a test, include what you tested, how you tested it, and what the result does and does not demonstrate. Never manufacture a testimonial to make an explanation more persuasive.

A simple review table can expose weak advice quickly. Write the recommendation in one column, the condition that makes it appropriate in another, and the action the reader should take in a third. If you cannot fill those cells, the recommendation may be too vague to publish. The goal is to make the article more useful, not merely longer.

Review structure, links, and presentation

Read only the headings in order. They should form a coherent path through the reader's problem. Repeated headings about benefits, advantages, and reasons often signal that the draft is restating itself. Merge those sections and use the recovered space for limitations, examples, or the next action. Keep the title specific enough that readers can predict the article's scope.

Check internal links individually. The linked page should be useful at that point in the explanation, and the link text should tell the reader what to expect. Avoid forcing a commercial link into an unrelated sentence. For external references, use the most direct supporting page rather than a search results page or a publisher's home page.

Preview the article on a narrow screen. Check the cover's alternative text, heading order, table readability, and any long URLs. A visually polished cover cannot compensate for an unreadable table or a missing explanation. Also review the page title and description: they should describe the article honestly rather than promising a definitive answer that the body does not provide.

Make publication a clear decision

Finish with a pass, revise, or hold decision. Pass means the article answers its stated question, material claims are supported, and the presentation works. Revise means a bounded change can make it ready, such as adding a concrete example or replacing an outdated reference. Hold means a central claim, safety concern, or missing source prevents a responsible publication decision.

Keep the reason with the draft so the next reviewer does not repeat the same investigation. Assign one person to the final decision when several people contribute. For automated workflows, define the same conditions in advance and send uncertain drafts for review. A schedule is a prompt to consider publication; it is not evidence that an article deserves to go live.

After publication, keep a small maintenance note for facts likely to change. Update the article when the substance changes, and make the date reflect actual editorial work. If your readers would reasonably want to know how automation contributed, explain the process plainly. Trust grows from useful work that can be inspected, not from an unsupported claim that every generated draft is perfect.