Writer settings — what each switch really does.
Ten controls in four groups. Every AI-search lever is on by default and should stay on; the only thing off is the sales pitch. Here's what you actually give up by turning one off.
Ten switches decide what kind of article you get. They're grouped into four, they're remembered per article, and the defaults are the ones we'd pick — every AI-search lever is on, and the only thing off is the sales pitch. This page says what each one actually does to the writing, so you can turn one off knowing what you're giving up.
The right rail
On desktop the settings live in a column down the right of the BlogCraft editor, with your Content Score pinned at the top. On mobile they collapse into a drawer behind the toolbar button.
Four groups, top to bottom. The first two are open by default; the last two you have to expand.
| Group | Contains | Default |
|---|---|---|
| Article Setup | Length, Tone | Expanded |
| AI Search Optimization | GEO/AEO, EEAT, NLP entities, SERP optimization | Expanded · all four ON |
| Linking & Conversion | External citations, Internal links, CTA | Collapsed · links ON, CTA OFF |
| SEO Outputs | FAQ + schema, Meta, Keyword tabs | Collapsed · all three ON |
Article Setup
Length
The AI recommendation, a custom word box, and four quick picks. It's the highest-impact control on the page — it sets the word target and the number of sections in your outline. It has its own page: Choosing a length →
Tone
Three choices, one at a time. Tone sits on top of your brand voice — it doesn't replace it. If you've trained a voice under Brand → Voice, that's still what the article sounds like; tone adjusts the register.
- Conversational (default) — addresses the reader as “you”, allows contractions, varies sentence length, will occasionally ask a rhetorical question.
- Professional — authoritative but not stiff. No contractions in headings, third person where it reads naturally.
- Technical — precise, prefers specific terminology, brings in data and code examples where they're relevant.
AI Search Optimization
These four are the reason a BlogCraft article gets quoted rather than merely indexed. All four are on by default, and unless you have a specific reason, leave them there.
GEO / AEO optimization
The big one. Turning it on tells the writer to build the article around the patterns that AI answer engines demonstrably pick up:
- A 40–55 word direct answer as the opening paragraph of the first section — the block an AI Overview lifts.
- Three or more statistics, each one in the same sentence as the source it came from.
- Two to three attributed quotes, in quotation marks with a name and a role. The highest-measured lifter of the lot.
- Twenty or more named entities — real people, brands, tools, places.
- Nested H2/H3 structure, so a machine can extract a section cleanly.
- A “Last updated” date stamp under the title. Recency is a strong citation signal.
It also produces the “N GEO transformations” chip you see when generation finishes — that's a log of which of these actually landed in your draft, not a promise that they did.
Turn it off and you get a plain, competently written article that will rank about as well as any other and get quoted noticeably less.
EEAT signals
Experience, expertise, authoritativeness, trust. With it on, the writer:
- injects an author byline block, using your founder bio from your brand profile if you've filled one in;
- works credentials and experience into the prose — years in the trade, a prior role, a named project;
- ties factual claims back to something verifiable rather than asserting them.
It draws on your brand profile. A thin profile means thin EEAT — there's nothing for it to cite about you.
NLP entity coverage
Pushes the writer to name 15 or more unique entities across the article: people, brands, products, places, concepts, tools. Entities are how a language model decides your page is about a real, specific thing rather than a topic in the abstract. They're also one of the eight criteria in your Content Score, and the easiest one to move.
SERP Optimization
Not a writing instruction — a feedback loop that runs during generation. It's the reason generation takes minutes rather than seconds.
Once the first draft exists, ScoutRival scores it against the real Content Score, works out which criteria are short (missing answer block? too few citations? not enough entities?), rewrites specifically to close those gaps, then re-scores. It's aiming for 88 out of 100.
The loop is bounded, and it stops early rather than grinding:
- Two passes, maximum.
- It stops if a pass gains fewer than 2 points — the optimiser has plateaued and further passes only cost you time.
- It stops if a pass lowers the score. That draft is thrown away and the better one kept.
- It stops if there's nothing left to fix.
- It stops if a pass pushes the article past its length ceiling.
Turning it off makes generation meaningfully faster and your score meaningfully lower.
Linking & Conversion
External citations · ON by default
Three to five outbound links to authoritative sources — studies, major publications, industry bodies — written as real markdown links. Real URLs only; the writer is explicitly forbidden from inventing them.
Turning it off does not remove your citations. It converts them into plain-text attributions instead — “According to Gartner (2024)…” — so the credibility signal survives without any links leaving your page. If you're worried about “leaking” link equity, that's the setting you want. Note the trade: an AI engine finds a linked source easier to verify than an unlinked one.
Internal link suggestions · ON by default
ScoutRival searches your own Content library for prior articles related to this one and surfaces the best matches in the SEO pack below the editor.
Two honest limits:
- It suggests; it doesn't insert. Nothing is added to your article automatically — you decide which links to place.
- It can only find what you've saved. This is a straight search of your content library, not the internet and not your live website. A new account has nothing to link to, and the card will be empty. That's not a bug.
It's a plain database lookup — no AI call, no credits.
CTA insertion · OFF by default
Two or three inline calls-to-action at natural points — after a key benefit, before a complex section, in the conclusion — written to reference what your business actually does rather than a generic “click here”.
It's off by default because it has no SEO or AI-citation benefit whatsoever. It's a conversion tool, and it's yours to opt into. Turn it on for a bottom-of-funnel piece; leave it off for the explainer that's meant to earn trust.
SEO Outputs
These control what appears in the SEO pack beneath your article. All three are on by default.
FAQ block + schema
Six to eight question-and-answer pairs at the end of the article, plus the nested FAQPage JSON-LD that makes them machine-readable.
Switching this off doesn't just hide a card. The FAQ section is stripped out of the outline before the article is written, and no schema is generated at all. FAQ schema is one of the heaviest-weighted criteria in your Content Score, so expect the score to drop as well as the section to vanish. Only turn it off if the piece genuinely has no questions worth answering.
Meta title + description
A separate, SEO-optimised meta title and description — written from the finished article at the end of generation, not from your outline. Targets are roughly 60 characters for the title and 155 for the description, which is about what Google displays. You'll find them, with a live SERP preview, in the SEO pack.
Keyword tabs
Display only. It shows a panel of your Primary / Secondary / Long-tail / Semantic keywords, with a chip per term telling you whether it appears in your body copy — so you can see which ones you still need to weave in.
It changes nothing about the article, costs nothing, and calls no AI. Turning it off just hides the panel.
When your changes take effect
Settings apply to the next generation. They never retro-edit an article you already have.
Flip any switch on an article that's already been generated and the outline pill flips to Edited · regenerate, and the Regenerate Full Article button — which is deliberately disabled when nothing has changed — comes back to life. Regenerating rewrites the article from scratch, at full cost.
If you only dislike a passage, don't pay for a whole new article. Select it and re-tune it, or run the free re-optimise from the SEO pack. Regeneration is for when the structure is wrong.