Topic Recommendations
How the Recommendations page generates, filters, and triages content topics from your knowledge base.
The Recommendations page is where new content topics enter your pipeline. Each topic is either an idea The Strategist generated from your knowledge base or one you added yourself. From here, you triage what's worth writing, filter the backlog, and hand approved topics off to the rest of the pipeline.
What's on the page
At the top you'll see a one-line legend explaining the two kinds of topic:
- New Content — no meaningful overlap with anything you've already published. The Writer will generate a fresh article.
- Refresh Existing — overlap detected with an existing topic or published URL. Opens the editor in refresh mode against the matched original.
Below the legend are filters, an action bar, and tabs that split the list by topic type. The list itself shows one card per topic with its title, format, status, and type.
Generating Recommendations
Click Generate in the action bar to ask The Strategist for a new batch. It analyzes your BaseForge knowledge base and your brand's strategic goals, then returns prioritized topic ideas.
A few things worth knowing before you generate:
- Generation is rate-limited to 5 requests per minute per user.
- If your knowledge base is empty, generation fails with a clear error — load BaseForge first.
- Each generated topic is automatically checked against your existing topics and published content. Overlapping ideas come back tagged as Refresh Existing instead of being silently dropped.
- New topics are queued for prompt sanitization in the background. They appear in the list immediately; the sanitized SoV query is added shortly after.
Adding your own topic
Click Add Your Own Topic to create a single topic by hand. You provide:
- Title (required, ≤ 500 characters)
- Format — Blog, FAQ, Case Study, or How-To
- Description (optional, ≤ 2000 characters)
- Target URL (optional)
If you supply a target URL, GEOforge always treats the topic as a refresh of whatever lives at that URL — even when the title doesn't semantically match an existing topic. GEOforge resolves the URL in two steps:
- If the URL matches an existing GEOforge topic's published URL (normalized — scheme,
www., and trailing slashes ignored), the new topic is linked to it as a refresh. - If there's no match, GEOforge fetches the live page and generates refresh instructions from its actual content.
High-quality source block
If the target URL is a citation-backed, clinical, or peer-reviewed page, the single-topic uploader blocks the refresh and asks you to confirm. Refreshing pages like that risks dropping references, tables, and named programs. To override, re-submit with preservation mode enabled — the Writer will keep citations, tables, and named programs intact.
Bulk upload from CSV
For larger batches, use the CSV bulk uploader. The accepted columns are:
| Column | Required | Notes |
|---|---|---|
title | yes | ≤ 500 chars |
format | no | blog, faq, case_study, or how_to (defaults to blog) |
description | no | ≤ 2000 chars |
target_url | no | Treated as a refresh, same as the single-topic flow |
Limits and behavior:
- Up to 50 rows per upload, 1 MB max file size, UTF-8 encoded.
- Rows with a
target_urlget the same URL-matching and refresh-instruction logic as the single-topic uploader. - If a row's
target_urlis a high-quality source, that row is rejected with an error — the rest of the batch still imports. To refresh a high-quality page, use the single-topic uploader so you can opt into preservation mode. - Invalid rows are reported back per-row (row number, title, error) so you can correct and re-upload only the affected rows.
A starter template is available from the bulk-upload dialog.
Filtering the list
The filter row narrows what you see without changing what's been generated:
- Search — matches topic titles (debounced).
- Status — Pending, Writing in Progress, Ready for Review, Ready for Publishing, Scheduled, or Published.
- Format — Blog, FAQ, Case Study, or How-To.
Filters combine, and pagination resets to page 1 whenever a filter changes.
The All / New / Refresh tabs
Above the list, three tabs split topics by type:
- All — everything.
- New Content — topics that will generate a fresh article.
- Refresh Existing — topics linked to an existing original.
The counts shown on each tab reflect your current brand's full backlog, not the filtered view. Switching tabs updates the URL (e.g. ?tab=refresh) so you can link directly to a filtered view.
Acting on a topic
Each card supports the actions you'd expect:
- Generate a draft — moves the topic from Pending into the Writer queue. Rate-limited to 3 generations per minute per user.
- Delete the topic.
- Publish (once a draft exists and has been approved) — handled inline from the card.
The Recommendations page is your entry point into the pipeline. Once a draft exists, most editing moves to the topic editor and the Pipeline board.
