Autopilot
How autopilot mode works — what runs automatically, what stays in your control, and how to choose between fully automatic vs review-first publishing.
Autopilot is Sage running the full content program on your behalf — turning topic ideas into published articles on a steady cadence without you having to manually click through every step.
What autopilot does
Autopilot takes each AI suggestion in your content calendar and runs the complete pipeline:
Builds the content brief — outline, tone, target audience, suggested word count
Picks the keywords — primary + secondary keywords pulled from your existing rankings + competitive analysis
Researches the topic — Sage's writer fetches real sources, statistics, and recent context for the article
Writes the article — full HTML with skim lines, headings, lists, tables, FAQ section, intentionally structured for AI extraction + featured snippets
Generates a featured image — editorial illustration in your brand colors
Enriches with assets — Key Takeaways callout, suggested internal links, optional charts, FAQ schema
Publishes to WordPress — only if you've turned on auto-publish mode
End to end: about 4–5 minutes per article. You can have multiple articles in flight at once.
Two modes
Auto-publish — articles go straight from "generated" to "live on your WordPress site". For agencies running content at volume on domains where the topic strategy is well-defined.
Generate + review — articles complete the full pipeline but land in ready_for_review. You preview, optionally edit, and click Publish manually. Slower but adds a human gate before content hits your site.
Toggle per-domain at the top of the Content Calendar.
What you control
What topics get generated — autopilot only runs against AI suggestions you've explicitly queued. Sage never invents articles out of thin air.
Cadence — autopilot fires on a daily schedule. If you queue 10 articles on Monday, autopilot won't try to generate all 10 at once; it spreads them across days based on your tier.
Tier caps — monthly article cap is set by your subscription. Hit the cap, autopilot pauses until the next billing cycle. Bring your own API key (BYOK) to bypass the cap.
Pause anytime — flip the Autopilot toggle off and Sage stops queueing new generations. Articles already in flight finish.
Category — Sage auto-picks a non-"Uncategorized" category for each article. You can also set a domain default if you want everything to land in one specific category.
What autopilot does NOT do without your input
Add new topics to the calendar — that's the AI Suggestions step; you choose what gets queued
Edit articles after publishing — once it's on your site, autopilot is hands-off. Edits are manual.
Decide your brand voice — sage-ai uses the tone you've established in your domain's settings. If you've configured a custom style override, autopilot respects it.
When to use auto-publish vs review-first
You've built confidence in Sage's output on this domain
The domain is new to Sage and you're calibrating
The topics are well-defined (e.g. service pages, comparison content)
The topics are sensitive or strategically important
You're running content at volume and reviewing every post is the bottleneck
You're publishing fewer, more carefully-crafted pieces
You've configured custom enrichment + image style preferences
You want a final human pass for tone, links, or claims
Most agencies run review-first on the first batch, auto-publish once they're satisfied.
What happens when something fails
The Activity panel shows the stage where the pipeline broke (writing, image, publish, etc.) + a one-click retry button
The Kanban "Failed" column collects anything that hit a terminal error
Sage auto-fails any generation stuck mid-pipeline past 30 minutes so the queue keeps flowing — no zombie generations
Related
How Sage Publishes Articles — what happens in step 7 above
Article Enrichment — what happens in step 6 above
URL Inspection — how Sage watches what Google does after publishing
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