Draft & Approval Workflow

When your publishing mode is set to Requires approval, every blog theStacc generates waits for a human to give it the green light before it goes live. This page walks through that review flow end to end - what a draft looks like, what you can check before you approve, and what happens to anything you reject.

If you have not chosen a publishing mode yet, see Publishing Modes & Autopilot first. For the complete list of every status a blog can move through, see the Blog Status Lifecycle.

The review flow at a glance#

A blog that has just finished generating lands in Pending Review (internally generated_pending_review). From there you have two choices:

• Approve - the draft moves to Ready to Publish (approved) and is cleared to go live.
• Reject - the draft moves to Rejected and stays in your project so you can fix or regenerate it later.

If you edit the content of a pending draft before deciding, it quietly moves to modified pending review (modified_pending_review) - same Pending Review badge in the calendar, but theStacc now knows the article is your edited version rather than the raw AI draft. You can still Approve or Reject from there.

Open any blog from the Content SEO dashboard (calendar or list view) to land on the blog detail page, where the Approve and Reject buttons appear in the action bar.

What you see before you approve#

The blog detail page gives you everything you need to make the call without leaving the screen:

• The full article - rendered in the editor with its title, slug, meta title, meta description, featured image, and body. You can read it exactly as it will publish.
• SEO score - an overall score out of 100, with a category-by-category breakdown (keyword placement, content length and depth, heading structure, readability, technical meta, images, and more) plus specific improvement suggestions. A score of 70 or above is treated as a healthy pass.
• Readability - scored as one of the SEO categories, so you can see at a glance whether the writing is clear and easy to read. (Readability scoring runs on English-language content.)
• Image count - the draft shows how many images were generated (featured image plus in-section images). If any images failed during generation, the draft still arrives in Pending Review so you can retry just the images without re-running the whole article.
• Compliance violations (regulated businesses only) - if your project has a compliance profile turned on (for regulated professions), a compliance banner flags any issues found in the content, listing each violation and any required disclosures that are missing. For most businesses this section does not appear at all.

Take your time here. You can edit anything - rewrite a paragraph, swap the featured image, fix the meta description, regenerate a single section or image - and theStacc saves your changes. As noted above, editing the body of a pending draft flips it to modified pending review so your edited version is what gets approved.

Approving a draft#

1. Open the blog from the Content SEO dashboard.
2. Read the article and check the SEO score, readability, image count, and (if shown) the compliance banner.
3. Make any edits you want.
4. Click Approve.

The blog moves to Ready to Publish. What happens next depends on your setup:

• Publish it now - on an approved blog, the action bar shows a Publish Now button. Click it to publish immediately. If you have a CMS connected (WordPress, Webflow, Ghost, Shopify, Zepio, or a webhook), the post is pushed straight to your site; if you publish without a CMS integration, theStacc marks the blog published and fires your project's deploy hook so pull-model sites (deploy hook plus the Public Blog API) go live.
• Let it publish on its schedule - in Autopilot (auto-publish mode), an approved-and-scheduled blog publishes automatically on its planned date. theStacc's publishing cron picks up scheduled blogs once their publish time arrives and pushes them live - no extra click. See Publishing Modes & Autopilot for how that hand-off works.

For the full publishing setup - connecting WordPress, Webflow, Ghost, Shopify, Zepio, or a webhook, and what each platform receives - see Publishing.

Rejecting a draft#

Click Reject on a pending draft and it moves to Rejected. Rejecting never deletes anything - the blog stays in your project, keeps its calendar slot, and keeps its title, keyword, and content until you decide what to do with it.

From a rejected blog you have three paths:

• Regenerate the plan - click Regenerate to get a fresh title and description (excerpt) for the same keyword, based on your current business details. This moves the blog back to a generatable state so you can produce a brand-new article on a different angle. Use this when the topic or angle missed the mark.
• Regenerate the content directly - if you like the title and just want a different write-up, generate content again against the existing plan.
• Approve anyway - changed your mind? A rejected blog shows an Approve Anyway action that sends it straight to Ready to Publish without regenerating - handy when you rejected by accident or decided the draft was fine after all.

Because rejected blogs stay put, nothing is ever lost by rejecting. You can come back to a rejected draft any time.

Who can approve#

Approving, rejecting, editing, and publishing all require an Editor role or higher. On a project that means Owner, Admin, or Editor can run the review flow. Viewers can open and read drafts but cannot approve, reject, edit, or publish. See Workspace & Team for how project roles work.

Where approval notifications appear#

When a blog finishes generating and is ready for your review, theStacc notifies every member of the project. The notification appears in your in-app notifications on the dashboard (a "Blog ready for review" alert linking to the draft), and you also receive an email so you know to come take a look even when you are not in the app. The same happens on the other side: when a blog is published, project members get a "Blog published" notification.

Because notifications go to the whole project team, anyone with approval rights can step in and review - useful when one person is away.

After you publish#

Once a blog is live it shows as Published with a View Live link (when your platform returns a URL). If you edit a published blog, theStacc flags it as needing a re-sync and shows a Sync Changes button so your live post stays in step with your edits. You can also Unpublish a post to pull it back to a draft state, then Republish when you are ready.

Related#

• Blog Status Lifecycle - every status a blog moves through, start to finish.
• Publishing - connect WordPress, Webflow, Ghost, Shopify, Zepio, or a webhook and control how posts reach your site.
• Publishing Modes & Autopilot - choose between no auto-publish, requires approval, and full autopilot.