Content Quality & Brain
The content types and topic clusters that shape the variety of articles autopilot writes.
Two settings decide what autopilot actually writes about: content types control the format, and topic clusters control the subject matter. Together, they're what keeps a month of autopilot output from reading like the same handful of article shapes on repeat.
HarperFlow can write in 16 formats, including comparison tables, how-to guides, buyer's guides, checklists, case studies, decision guides, and troubleshooting guides. Onboarding starts you with all 16 in play; you can narrow the list to just the formats that fit your site from your project settings at any time, and broaden it again later if you change your mind. HarperFlow picks whichever allowed format best fits a given keyword itself, rather than you choosing one per article.
Topic clusters are the subject areas your content covers, drawn from your niche during onboarding. HarperFlow drafts an initial set of 12 candidates for you to review, and you can edit that list, renaming, removing, or adding to it, into a final reviewed set of anywhere from 12 to 24 clusters before autopilot is allowed to run.
Each topic cluster keeps its own bank of article topics: real searches people make in your market and language, found from up to four head searches per cluster. HarperFlow filters out competitor brands, "near me" and store searches, and near-identical wordings, and keeps only topics that fit your site. Each run takes its topic from the cluster you've written about least recently, so a focused site can publish many different articles on one subject without repeating itself. A cluster that just gave a topic rests for about two and a half days, so one cluster never takes over; when no cluster is ready, HarperFlow's regular discovery finds the topic instead.
On the Brain page, open Searches & topics under any cluster to see its head searches, how many topics are left, and when the bank was last refilled. Owners and admins can add, remove or replace head searches (up to four); your searches are kept as you set them. Banks refill on their own when they run low, at most once a day, and Refill now queues one straight away. If a cluster shows a warning, HarperFlow found too little search demand for it: add searches your customers use, and until then articles come from your other clusters.
Autopilot requires at least 12 reviewed, active clusters before it will dispatch a run. This isn't a soft recommendation: a project sitting below that line simply won't be picked up until you're back above it, no matter how healthy the rest of its setup is.
If you reset onboarding and go through cluster review again, your previous clusters aren't deleted. They're marked inactive instead, so any already-published articles keep their original topic-cluster association even though the cluster itself no longer counts toward your active set.
Warning: A big edit to your topic clusters, or a reset, can temporarily drop you below the 12-cluster minimum and pause autopilot until you've reviewed enough of them again.
