Knowledge base

The knowledge base (KB) is CiteFlow's understanding of your business. It's how the article generator knows your products, audience, tone, and positioning without you having to brief it every time. A good KB is what separates generic SEO filler from articles that actually sound like your brand.

What does the knowledge base capture?

Every approved KB has the following fields:

• Business description, what you do, in one paragraph.
• Positioning, how you differ from alternatives.
• Products and services, the things you sell or offer.
• Target audience signals, who you serve, with the cues that surfaced during the audit (job titles, intents, pain points).
• Brand voice characteristics, formality, warmth, technical density, humour, etc.
• Tone of voice patterns, recurring phrasings, do's and don'ts, words you favour or avoid.
• Content themes, the topical pillars your site already covers.
• Key entities, named products, methodologies, people, places that should be referenced consistently.
• Recommended content topics, suggestions for the next 10–30 articles, derived from gaps in your audit.
• Question patterns, the actual questions your prospects ask, in the language they ask them. Used both for topics and for AEO structure inside articles.

How does auto-synthesis work?

You don't write the KB from scratch. After your first audit completes, CiteFlow automatically synthesises a draft KB by sending the highest-quality pages from the audit to Claude Sonnet with a structured prompt. The draft typically lands within a few minutes of audit completion.

You'll see a banner on your dashboard when the draft is ready for review.

How do you review and approve the KB?

The draft is not active. No content generation happens until you've reviewed and approved the KB. The workflow:

1. Open /dashboard/knowledge-base.
2. Read each field. Edit anything that's wrong, imprecise, or off-brand. Edits auto-save as you type.
3. Click Approve when you're satisfied.

Why approval is required: every generated article reads from the approved KB. An inaccurate KB produces inaccurate articles at scale. The two-minute review at the start saves hours of revisions later.

How do you regenerate the KB?

You can request a fresh draft at any time (after re-audits, after a brand change, after launching a new product line). The flow is compare-and-supersede:

1. Click Regenerate. A new draft is created from your most recent audit.
2. Your existing approved KB stays active while the new draft is under review, content generation keeps working.
3. Review and edit the new draft.
4. Approve it when ready. The previous approved KB is superseded and archived.

If you don't like the new draft, simply discard it. The existing approved KB remains untouched.

Where is edit history kept?

Approved KBs are versioned. Articles record which KB version they were generated against so you can trace why an older article phrased something a certain way.

How does the KB affect content quality?

Concretely, every article generation prompt includes:

• Business description, positioning, products and services as context.
• Brand voice and tone-of-voice patterns as style constraints.
• Key entities as the canonical terminology to use.
• Question patterns as AEO seeds for the article's FAQ section.

If your articles feel off-brand, the fix is almost always in the KB, not in the prompt.

How is brand voice captured?

The brand voice section is the highest-leverage field. Three useful axes:

• Formality, corporate, professional, conversational, casual, irreverent.
• Density, concise and skimmable, or thorough and detailed.
• Vocabulary patterns, sentence length, jargon tolerance, use of contractions, UK vs US English conventions (we enforce UK English at the generation layer regardless).

Be specific. "Friendly but professional" is less useful than "Warm, second-person, contractions allowed, no exclamation marks, never start a sentence with 'So,'".

How do you troubleshoot KB issues?

"My KB says things my business doesn't do."

The KB is synthesised from what's visible on your site at audit time. Causes:

• The audit caught marketing copy from a campaign you've retired but haven't taken down, fix the site, regenerate the KB.
• Your highest-scoring pages (which the synthesiser weights heavily) aren't representative of your core business. Edit the field directly, then approve.
• The audit didn't reach your most important pages (blocked by robots.txt, no internal links, missing from sitemap). Fix the audit-side issue first, re-audit, then regenerate.

"My brand voice section is too generic."

Replace it with specifics. Two paragraphs of concrete rules (formality, sentence length, do's, don'ts, examples) beats a three-line abstract statement every time.

"The recommended topics aren't great."

Recommended topics improve with each re-audit as we see more of your content. You can also seed them yourself in the topic queue.

Related

• Audits, the data source the KB synthesises from
• Topic queue, turn recommended topics into a publication schedule
• Article generation, how the KB feeds each article