What This Isn't
This is not "AI writes your blog." We don't ship that, and we'd talk you out of buying it from anyone else.
The fully-automated content services on the market (Jasper auto-blog, Surfer SEO bulk publish, the various "100 posts a month for $99" offers) produce output that ranks for nothing, reads like a forgery, and accumulates as a liability on your domain. Google's March 2024 helpful content updates made that explicit. We've watched sites lose 60% of their organic traffic for it.
If you want fully automated content with no human in the loop, we'll point you at Jasper or Writesonic. We don't do it.
What This Is
A five-step pipeline where AI does the heavy lifting on the first three steps and humans own the last two. The end product is publishable content with editorial standards intact, produced in roughly one-fifth the time it took before.
1. Research ← AI accelerates
2. Outline ← AI accelerates
3. Draft ← AI accelerates
4. Edit ← Human owns
5. Publish ← Human owns
Step 1 — Research
The brief defines the question the article answers, who's reading it, and what action they take after. AI summarizes recent sources, surfaces conflicting viewpoints, pulls in primary data where it exists, and flags claims that need verification. We use Perplexity for source-traced summaries and Claude for synthesis.
Every claim that makes it past this step has a source. We don't carry forward anything we can't link.
Step 2 — Outline
AI proposes a structure. We push back. The outline gets tightened to one clear argument with three to five supporting beats. If the article can't survive an outline review, we kill it here — not after a draft.
Step 3 — Draft
AI generates the first draft against the approved outline. This is the step where the time savings show up: a 1,500-word draft in 20 minutes instead of three afternoons. Quality is "decent first draft" — readable, structurally correct, factually traceable. Not publishable yet.
Step 4 — Edit (Human Owns)
This is where the article becomes yours. An editor — your subject matter expert, not the AI — rewrites the passages that don't sound like you, replaces generic examples with specific stories, removes anything that smells like AI filler ("In today's fast-paced digital landscape..."), checks every claim against its source, and decides what to cut.
Typical edit cuts the draft by 20–30% and rewrites 40–60% of the surviving prose. That's not a failure of the AI; that's the entire point.
Step 5 — Publish (Human Owns)
Pick the publish date. Set the canonical URL. Write the meta description by hand. Verify schema markup. Hit publish. Submit to Google's Indexing API to accelerate the re-crawl.
The human owns the publish button because publishing is a business decision, not a generation task.
What We Use
- Claude — long-form drafting, editing assistance, structural review
- Perplexity — research with traceable sources
- OpenAI — alternative drafting, image generation when needed
- Your CMS — WordPress, Webflow, or Next.js + MDX (preferred for technical clients)
We don't lock you into a tool stack. The pipeline runs on whatever you already use.
Pricing
Per-engagement. A typical content program looks like:
| Cadence | What you get | Investment | |---------|--------------|------------| | Pilot (one article) | One fully-produced piece, plus a documented pipeline you can run yourself | $750 | | Monthly (4 articles) | Four pieces a month with editorial review, scheduled publish, Indexing API submission | $2,400/month | | Quarterly sprint | Ten pieces in 60 days, used to seed a new topic cluster or recover a stale site | $5,500 |
These are real numbers, not anchor pricing. If your needs are different, we'll quote it differently. We don't have a "platinum tier."
When This Works
- You have subject matter expertise but can't find writing time.
- You're shipping content but it sounds like it was written by a stranger.
- You've tried fully-automated AI content and watched the traffic die.
- You need to scale from two articles a month to ten without hiring.
When It Doesn't
- You need news content with a six-hour turnaround. Get a journalist.
- You're producing regulated content (medical, legal, financial advice). The editorial overhead eliminates the time savings.
- You don't have a subject matter expert who can edit. Without the human in the chair, this pipeline produces mediocre content faster.
How to Start
Send a sample piece you've published and a topic you've been meaning to write about for six months. We'll run it through the pipeline, ship you the result, and you can decide whether to continue. The pilot is $750 and you keep the documented pipeline either way.
Hank Groman | hank@lastapple.com | 949-529-9017