When an agent drafts your blog every week and the pages could belong to any company in your category, the advice is usually the same: write a better prompt, or add rules to the one you have. This page is for the Head of Content who has tried both and still gets fluent pages a competitor could sign.
The prompt is rarely where the draft went generic. It went generic in what the agent read before it started, and the fix is to assemble that material properly, then stop adding rules. We call the set of files an agent reads before it drafts the pack, and the pack is where most of the quality of an agent-written page is decided.
Empact Partners, the consultancy behind this site, has run go-to-market work inside B2B software companies since 2020. Our consultants publish the Empact Zone through a content system where a consultant decides what each article argues, assembles the pack the drafting agents read, and signs what ships. Here is the pack in reading order.
| What goes in | The question it answers | Where it comes from at a SaaS company |
|---|---|---|
| The decision | Who is reading, in what state, and what does this page argue? | The person who owns the piece, written down before anything else |
| The company | Who is talking, what do they do, and what will they never say? | Positioning and messaging, the website’s own claims, a list of banned words |
| The buyers’ words | What does the reader call the problem? | Call recordings, support tickets, churn notes, demo questions, public threads |
| The numbers | Which figures may it use, and where is each one published? | Case studies, the pricing page, the sales deck, each figure with its link |
| The examples | What does a good piece do here, and what must it never copy? | Two or three pieces that worked, each with a note on what it teaches |
| The checks | What gets a draft refused, and what makes it good? | A short refusal list, and a few questions an editor answers |
Decide What The Piece Argues Before The Agent Reads Anything
A topic is a request for the agent to decide, and it decides the way an average would: the definition, then the conclusion every other page already reached. So every commission our consultants hand over carries four fields before any other material:
The first field goes further than the audience line every brief template asks for. It comes from the twelve outlines I typed for our March articles, which named the reader in the moment something went wrong.
“Marketing leaders interested in AI content” gives the agent nobody to talk to. “A Head of Content whose agent ships four posts a week, none of which a buyer has ever quoted back” gives it an opening and the objection to answer first.
The second field is the one most briefs skip. If nobody could argue with the sentence, the agent has nothing to defend for two thousand words, and even a decided argument comes out generic until the agent knows whose argument it is, which the next file settles.
Put What The Company Is At The Front Of The Pack
The first file every session of ours opens is about the company, and a positioning file worth putting first answers five things:
Positioning goes first because of what happened without it. A sibling publication of ours ran on instructions full of rules about sentence rhythm and empty about what the company sold, and it shipped four articles that never said what the company was.
Check that the agent can open what you give it, too. Our old parent voice document ran to 603 lines and was saved as a zip, which the tool that loads instructions does not read. For six months the document every other instruction cited loaded into nothing, and nobody noticed, because the drafts kept arriving.
The before and after sits on our own pages. We counted what the 44 pages served on the day the new pack went live said about us once the quote cards were set aside, then counted the same three things across the 123 pages written since.
Read the gap with its limit inside it. The rebuild changed more than the order of the files, and a check now refuses any page that never names the company, which is why that row reaches every page. Nothing checks for the other two words. They arrive because the agent reads them before it writes anything.
.png)
You can run the same count on your own blog this afternoon. Take the three words your positioning uses that a competitor’s would not, and count the pages that carry them. If the answer is a handful, the agent is not reading your positioning, whatever the prompt says.
Every Quote And Number In The Pack Carries Its Source
The company’s words now sit at the front of the pack, which is why the buyers’ words have to sit apart from them. An agent given both in one document puts your positioning in the buyer’s mouth, and a buyer who reads their own problem described in your tagline stops reading.
Buyers’ words, with where they were said
The conversation behind the topic travels with each commission too, and under it a file of Reddit threads read comment by comment. A buyer line earns its place in the pack only with five things attached:
The screen on who matters as much as the words. One account in the threads we read for this subject posted ten long, polite pieces of advice in twenty-two minutes, across subreddits about candles and stickers. It stayed out of the pack.
For a SaaS company the best of this material is already inside the building: call recordings, support tickets, churn notes, and the questions prospects ask in a demo.
Your own numbers, with the page that publishes them
Our proof table carries every partner result in four columns: the starting point, the end point, the time between them, and the page on empact.partners that publishes it. The last column exists because of a re-read. On 20 September we opened every case study and checked each figure against its live page, and three did not survive.
| The figure as we carried it | What the case studies publish |
|---|---|
| flair’s 1600% organic growth | The figure, but on the FAIR VC page, not on flair’s own |
| buycycle’s monthly organic sessions | A percentage (500%+) on the FAIR VC page, and no session count anywhere |
| wecantrack’s domain rating | Nothing: its page publishes the traffic, never the rating |
Each had come from a summary instead of a page, and each was nearly true. An agent repeats any number it finds in the pack with complete confidence, so the pack decides which numbers exist. A partner we may name is not a figure we may quote either: the name needs a public case study, and the number needs a page that prints it.
Your own figures go in the same way. Every number from a case study, the sales deck or the pricing page carries its link, and beside them sits the list of customers the agent may never name. The customer it names without permission is the one who reads the page.
Examples Get Copied, So Say What Each One Teaches
The usual advice for briefing an agent is to include examples of good output. Ours did, and the agent copied them. The first four pages under the new system, all of which I sent back, echoed the instructions’ own examples, the worst on thirty-nine shared runs of words, and one opening scene arrived almost word for word.
So the examples in our instructions now come from other trades: detention charges on a freight load, a beehive in February, a surveyor lifting floorboards. The move transfers and the sentence cannot, because no Empact Zone article is about bees. A check refuses any run of seven words a draft shares with one of them.
If you give an agent pieces that worked, annotate each one with three notes:
We read our own served pages the same way, for shape and never for substance. How long a piece of this kind runs and where a table earns its place transfer. Its argument and its examples never do.
Write Acceptance As A Few Refusals And Questions, Not More Rules
.png)
With the material in place, the instinct is to add rules. Ours had plenty. The instructions we inherited were about sixty percent counts: word bands, block-list rules, how many jokes and where. Against those numbers, the ten articles of our March 2026 wave broke the em-dash rule six to fifteen times over and the list rule in all ten.
Nobody ignored the instructions. They were written in prose and never checked. The em dash is the tell your reviewers probably name first, and the cleanest record of an unchecked rule: ours sat in three house documents with three different numbers, none enforced, and the 44 pages live in September carried nearly four hundred.
So we split acceptance in two. A refusal is something wrong every single time it appears, and a script checks it. Everything else is a question a person answers about the whole page.
| Refused by a check | Answered by a person |
|---|---|
| A word the company never uses about itself | Could a stranger say who wrote this and what they do? |
| A name the agent may never print | Does the argument survive being retold in three sentences? |
| A link the format does not allow | Delete every sentence naming the company: is anyone’s guide left? |
| A second em dash in one paragraph | Does each section end on what to do, never on a summary? |
A refusal list is a word list and a handful of patterns, and a content team can keep one in a spreadsheet before anyone writes a script for it. We struck every count we inherited. The numbers left are typographic, like the em-dash budget and the character cap on an excerpt, plus a few I set myself, such as how far a paragraph may run.
What in-house marketers and copywriters say on Reddit
“The reason why we opted to use a writer is because Claude, Perplexity, and CoPilot among the 10 or so AI agents did not follow the instructions we used to avoid writing like an AI.” — u/mapotofurice, r/copywriting, Jul 2026
“I sometimes find that, when the AI plots out a roadmap for an entire piece of work, the writing ends up feeling mechanical even with the best intentions.” — u/stephenmarsh, r/copywriting, Jul 2026
The first is an in-house SaaS marketer describing instructions with no material behind them. The second is the other side of the same lesson: past a point, the structure handed to the writer is what makes the page read like a machine.
The Consultant Owns The Pack, And Every Note Goes Back Into It
The previous generation of our system split each article across ten agents, each handing its part down the line. It shipped pages that passed every check, and I rejected them. A piece assembled from parts reads like parts, so one session now owns an article from angle to live page, and the consultant on the byline owns every decision in it.
| Decision | Who makes it | Where it lives in the pack |
|---|---|---|
| What the piece argues, and for whom | The consultant on the byline | The first lines of the brief |
| What the company may claim | The consultant, from the positioning file and the case studies | Positioning and the proof table |
| Whether the draft ships | The consultant on the byline | The sign-off, and the name on the page |
| Whether a rule changes | One owner, which for the Empact Zone is me | A changed line the next session reads first |
The last row is the loop that keeps the pack alive. Whoever hears a note about a published piece files it that day. A round answers each note in writing, only my ruling changes a rule, and the next session reads the changed rule before it drafts. Thirteen people write here with full access to the files, which is why one person decides what they say.
Mechanically, the pack is a handful of files the agent reads in a fixed order at the start of each session. The ones only a later stage needs, such as the publishing rules, wait until that stage begins, and one file per job keeps the agent from blending them.
The cost splits the same way the table does, into a half one person can start this week and a half that needs an owner:
That second half is the Content Marketing workstream at Empact Partners: a SaaS publication instead of a blog, built on the company’s own proof and signed by a named consultant. Working with us on it, which we call marketing engineering, opens with an audit of the content work your team repeats.
Your team brings the record, from call recordings to case studies. Our consultant turns it into the pack, puts one agent on one job, and answers for what it produces against a measure settled before the build. The horizon is quarters.
Our consultants run the Empact Zone in that order: decide, assemble, hand the drafting to the agents, and file every note back, so most of what a page will be is settled before its first sentence exists. If your agent drafts every week and the pages could still belong to anyone, book a call with me, and let’s see whether we could work on it together.
