The Strategist

The Strategist generates prioritized content recommendations for your company. It looks at what you already know (your BaseForge knowledge base), what you're trying to achieve (your strategic goals and competitors), and — once you have enough measurement history — where you're losing ground in AI answer engines.

Each recommendation becomes a topic in ContentForge with a title, description, format, target audience, and priority score. From there, the Writer takes over.

Two modes, picked automatically

The Strategist runs in one of two modes depending on how much Share of Voice (SoV) data your brand has accumulated.

Knowledge-driven mode is the default for new brands. The Strategist analyses your knowledge base — file summaries, common topics, frequent entities — alongside your strategic goals and competitor list, and recommends topics where you have demonstrable expertise.

SoV-driven mode activates once you have at least three tracked topics with at least two SoV measurements each. In this mode, recommendations are reactive: the Strategist looks for topics where your visibility is declining or competitors are gaining, then searches your knowledge base for supporting material to defend or reclaim those positions.

What goes into a recommendation

Every recommendation includes:

• Topic — the working title.
• Description — what the piece should cover.
• Format — Blog, FAQ, Case Study, or How-To.
• Target ICP — the audience the piece is aimed at.
• Priority score — 1 to 10.
• Rationale — why the Strategist picked it.
• Perception shift — the change in how a reader should think about your company after reading.
• SoV trigger (SoV mode only) — which competitive gap or decline prompted this recommendation.

Recommendations are written into ContentForge with status Pending. They show up in your topic list ready to be generated by the Writer.

Format mix

By default, the Strategist distributes recommendations across the four formats — Blog, FAQ, Case Study, How-To — to avoid leaning entirely on one type.

If you want to constrain output to specific formats (e.g. only How-To and Case Study), pass a format filter when you trigger a run. The Strategist will only return recommendations in those formats and will distribute across them. Off-spec recommendations are dropped rather than silently coerced.

How duplication is handled

The Strategist injects your existing topic titles into its prompt so it knows what's already on your roadmap. This prevents most overlap up front.

Genuine near-duplicates still slip through occasionally. Those are caught after the Writer drafts the article, when GEOforge compares the generated content against existing drafts and published material. If a match is found, the topic is flagged for human review in ContentForge — you decide whether to link it as a refresh of the original or keep it as a standalone piece.

Requirements before you run it

The Strategist needs:

• A brand profile with name, description, strategic goals, and competitors. Incomplete profiles produce thinner recommendations.
• Ingested files in BaseForge. Knowledge-driven mode fails outright if no files are ingested. SoV-driven mode will run without a knowledge base but will warn that recommendations have no supporting evidence.
• SoV measurement history (SoV mode only) — at least three tracked topics with two or more measurements each. Without this, the Strategist falls back to knowledge-driven mode.

Customizing the prompts

The Strategist is driven by a set of editable prompts:

• STRATEGIST_SYSTEM_PROMPT — core instructions for knowledge-driven mode.
• SOV_STRATEGIST_SYSTEM_PROMPT — core instructions for SoV-driven mode.
• SOV_USER_PROMPT_TEMPLATE — the per-run template that injects SoV gaps and knowledge context.
• COMPETITOR_CONTEXT_TEMPLATE — how competitors are formatted into either system prompt.

An admin can override any of these per brand in Settings → Agent Prompts.