Step 1 — keyword, intent & title.
Five titles with character counts, a shape each, and one best-CTR pick. The trap: touching the keyword or the intent wipes all five, so settle those before you generate.
Step 1 is two fields and a button, and it decides more than it looks like it does. The keyword you type here seeds the search research, the outline, the recommended length and every heading in the finished article. Get this right and the rest of BlogCraft mostly takes care of itself.
The primary keyword
One field, at the top of the page. Rules:
- Minimum 3 characters. Below that, the Suggest 5 titles button stays greyed out.
- Maximum 200 characters. You will not need them.
Write the phrase a customer would actually type into Google, not your internal name for the thing. “Emergency boiler repair cost” is a keyword. “Heating solutions” is a category heading.
ScoutRival reads your keyword to work out what kind of page ranks for it. A keyword with “cost” or “price” in it gets sized short, because short pages win those searches. A keyword containing “ultimate guide” gets sized long. This happens automatically. Choosing a length →
The three intents
Pick one. It changes the shape of the titles you're offered, the structure of the outline, and how long the article is sized to be.
| Intent | For | What it produces |
|---|---|---|
| Informational | Explain · educate · how-to | The teaching article. Room to cover the topic properly, and the intent most likely to get a how-to structure. |
| Commercial | Best X · top picks · reviews | The buyer's-shortlist article. Covers the options without padding. |
| Comparison | X vs Y · alternatives | The head-to-head. Most likely to get a comparison-table section in the outline. |
Informational is the default, and it's the right answer more often than people expect — most searches that look commercial are really someone trying to understand their own problem.
Suggest 5 titles
Hit the button and ScoutRival Intelligence writes exactly five title variants for your keyword and intent. Five is deliberate: three is too few to choose from, ten induces paralysis.
Every variant is aimed at 40–65 characters, with 60 as the target — that's roughly where Google stops showing your title in the results and starts cutting it off. The keyword is worked in naturally, front-loaded where it fits.
It takes about a second. If the AI can't be reached at all, you get a single fallback title built from your keyword rather than an error — you can edit it and carry on.
Reading the five cards
Each card carries three or four chips under the title. They're the whole reason there are five of them.
- The character count. Turns orange above 60 characters. That's not a failure — it's a warning that Google may truncate it.
- The sentiment chip. The shape of the headline. Each of the five gets a different one, so you're choosing between genuinely different angles rather than five paraphrases:
Question (phrased as a real reader question) · Listicle (leads with a number) · How-to (guide framing) · Direct (flat declarative) · Curiosity (opens a loop). - ★ Best CTR predicted. Exactly one card gets it. It's the variant judged most likely to earn the click, weighing character count against 60, whether the keyword is front-loaded, how well it matches your intent, and how strong the hook is. It's auto-selected for you.
- Selected · editable. On whichever card you're currently on.
“Best CTR predicted” is the model's opinion, formed from the headline alone. It has never seen your audience. If one of the other four sounds more like something your customers would click, take that one — you know them and it doesn't.
Editing and regenerating
Click any card to select it. The selected card turns into a text field — type straight into it. Most people edit the title before they publish, so this is expected, not a workaround. The cap is 200 characters.
Don't like any of them? Regenerate all 5, top-right of the list, writes a fresh set. There is deliberately no per-card regenerate — it's one button, all five, so you keep comparing five distinct shapes instead of slowly nudging one card into a local maximum.
Changing the keyword wipes the variants
This one catches people.
Touching the keyword field — even one character — or switching the intent clears all five title cards and your selection. They were written for the old keyword, so keeping them would be a lie. You'll need to hit Suggest 5 titles again.
So: settle the keyword and the intent first, then generate titles. If you're mid-way through editing a title you like and you realise the keyword is wrong, copy the title somewhere safe before you touch the keyword field.
Continue with this title
Nothing happens downstream until you click Continue with this title at the bottom of Step 1.
That button is the gate. Until you press it, Step 2 sits empty and says so, and no research runs. This is on purpose: the outline pipeline reads live search results and builds the article's whole spine from your title, so it should fire once, on the title you actually meant — not on every keystroke while you're still editing.
Once pressed, the button turns green and reads Confirmed · re-confirm. Edit the title afterwards and you can press it again to rebuild Step 2 around the new one.
Next: Step 2 — the outline →