Brief-to-Draft Validation Gate (QA)

Brief-to-Draft Validation Gate (QA)

1. 01

   Re-read the live SERP for the target keyphrase before opening the brief

   Rankings shift between brief creation and draft submission. Confirm the top five results still match the intent the brief assumed, and flag any page that has been replaced by a different content type.

2. 02

   Score the draft against the brief's entity and question coverage, not word count

   Tools such as Dashword and Content Harmony grade drafts on topic coverage; treat a missing subtopic as a hard fail and an extra 200 words as neither pass nor fail.

3. 03

   Check that every recommended heading maps to a real user question

   If a heading exists only because a competitor used it, cut it. Briefs generated from SERP scraping inherit competitor padding, and junior writers will reproduce it without a prompt.

4. 04

   Verify brand voice against the client's approved sample, sentence by sentence

   Pull one paragraph from the client's own site and one from the draft, then compare tone, person, and terminology. AI-drafted sections drift toward generic register even when the brief specifies voice.

5. 05

   Confirm the primary keyphrase appears in title, H1, and first 100 words without stuffing

   Count exact-match repetitions across the body. Anything above roughly one mention per 150 words reads as mechanical to editors and to answer engines summarizing the page.

6. 06

   Run an answer engine check on the draft's core question

   Query ChatGPT, Claude, and Google AI Mode with the client's service-category question and note whether the draft's structure would survive being quoted in a two-sentence answer. Forrester frames this as the visibility frontier agencies now sell against.

7. 07

   Log every deviation from the brief with a reason code before returning to the writer

   Reason codes (intent mismatch, missing entity, voice drift, thin evidence) let an agency see whether the brief or the writer caused the revision, which is the only way to fix the process rather than the article.