---
title: "Content Directions"
description: "The lanes your blog writes in. A Direction decides the angle, the length, the call to action and who has to approve the result."
updated: "2026-08-18"
verifiedAgainst:
  - packages/shared/src/strategy.ts
  - packages/shared/src/topic-direction.ts
---

A Content Direction is the most consequential object in the product. It decides
what gets written, how, and whether a human sees it before the world does.

Directions come out of an approved strategy. You can edit them, disable them, or
add your own.

## What a Direction carries

<PropertyList>
  <Property name="name and description">
    What this lane is, in your words.
  </Property>
  <Property name="pillar and angle">
    The theme it belongs to and the perspective it takes.
  </Property>
  <Property name="audienceSegment and funnelStage">
    Who it is for and where they are in the buying journey.
  </Property>
  <Property name="targetKeywords">
    The keywords this lane is trying to reach.
  </Property>
  <Property name="approval" type="auto | review">
    The gate every post in this lane has to pass. Covered below.
  </Property>
  <Property name="length" type="short | standard | long">
    How long articles should be. With `lengthMode` set to `auto`, the drafting
    worker chooses the depth the evidence supports instead of holding to a fixed
    preference.
  </Property>
  <Property name="cta" type="book_demo | start_trial | lead_magnet | newsletter | none">
    What posts in this lane ask the reader to do.
  </Property>
  <Property name="leadCapture" type="boolean">
    Whether posts in this lane invite an email address.
  </Property>
  <Property name="share">
    How much of the blog's output belongs to this lane.
  </Property>
  <Property name="enabled">
    Whether the lane is in use at all. Disabling a Direction stops new work in it
    without deleting its history.
  </Property>
</PropertyList>

## The approval policy

This is the setting to understand before turning on automation.

| Policy | What it means |
| --- | --- |
| `auto` | Posts in this lane may publish without a person approving them |
| `review` | A post waits for a person before it can be published |

<Callout variant="note" title="You may see a third value on an older Direction">
  `founder`, a stricter form of review, can still be read and is still honoured
  everywhere it appears, but it can no longer be set. A Direction created or
  edited today is `auto` or `review`. If one of yours says `founder`, it keeps
  working; changing it is a one way move.
</Callout>

<Callout variant="danger" title="auto means auto">
  A Direction set to `auto`, in a Project running Autopilot in Full mode, will
  publish articles to your public blog with nobody reading them first. That is
  the intended behaviour of the setting, and it is the right one for lanes you
  trust. It is worth being deliberate about which lanes those are.
</Callout>

Setting a Direction to publish automatically is recorded as an acknowledgement
rather than a silent toggle, so there is a record of the decision alongside the
setting.

## Directions and Topics

A Topic usually belongs to a Direction, and inherits its approval policy, length,
and call to action. A Topic can also belong to none, which happens when it comes
from Competitor Blog Watch triage or when you clear the Direction by hand. An
unattributed Topic is a valid editorial state, not a broken record.

## Changing a Direction

Changes apply to work produced from that point on. Posts already drafted keep
the settings they were drafted under, which is why changing a call to action
does not rewrite your archive.