Publishing Articles to Your Website

Publishing sends a finished article from the content writer to your website. WordPress sites use the AI Rank Lab plugin, which creates or updates the post with its images, categories and Yoast or All in One SEO meta. Any other CMS receives one JSON request signed with HMAC-SHA256. Both send the live URL back, so AI Rank Lab can track whether the page earns AI citations.

What Gets Sent

Everything needed to publish the article properly — not just the body text

1. The article itselfBody HTML, the H1 heading, URL slug, excerpt, reading time, word count, categories, tags and author. The title your CMS shows and the meta title are sent separately, because they are usually not the same sentence.
2. Search metadataMeta title and description (clamped to the lengths Google actually displays), canonical URL, robots directive, and the full Open Graph and Twitter card fields so shared links render correctly.
3. Images with sideload metadataThe hero image and every in-body image arrive as absolute URLs plus alt text, caption, filename, dimensions and MIME type. Your receiver copies them into its own media library so your published pages do not depend on our CDN.
4. Structured dataA complete JSON-LD graph — Organization, WebSite, WebPage, BreadcrumbList, the Article/BlogPosting, and FAQPage when the article has FAQs — all cross-referenced. Render it as one script tag. HowTo is included only for genuinely procedural articles.
5. FAQ pairsThe question and answer pairs as structured data, separate from the body HTML, so your theme can render them in its own FAQ component if it has one.

WordPress Setup

Install the plugin and connect it in about two minutes

1. Install the pluginDownload airanklab.zip from Dashboard → Webhooks. In WordPress go to Plugins → Add New → Upload Plugin, upload it and activate it.
2. Validate your API keyIn WordPress open AI Rank Lab → Settings, paste the API key shown on the Webhooks page, click Validate, tick Activate and save. Your site must already be one of your AI Rank Lab domains — the plugin links itself to that domain.
3. Connect the siteOn Dashboard → Webhooks click Connect WordPress and pick the domain. We find the plugin, build the publish webhook and check that WordPress accepts your credentials — without publishing anything. Sites you validated in the previous step also appear there automatically.
4. Choose defaultsPick the post status (draft is a safe start) and optional categories while connecting. Use the optional site URL field if WordPress lives at www, in a subfolder or on http.
5. PublishThe plugin creates the post (or updates the one with the same slug), downloads images into your media library, sets the featured image, assigns categories and tags, and writes Yoast or All in One SEO meta. If a publish fails, Test connection on the Webhooks page tells you exactly what to fix.

Any Other CMS

One signed JSON request — wire it to whatever you run

1. Read the contractThe complete payload specification lives in docs/CONTENT_PUBLISH_WEBHOOK.md, with a full worked example and verification code in Node, PHP and Python.
2. Verify the signatureEach request carries X-AIRankLab-Signature: an HMAC-SHA256 of the timestamp, a dot, and the raw body. Verify it against the raw bytes before parsing, and reject anything older than five minutes.
3. Handle idempotencyEvery request carries an idempotency key that stays the same while the article is unchanged. Store it against the post you create, and return the existing post when you see a key again. Retries are normal — without this, one network blip becomes three copies of the article.
4. Return the live URLRespond with 2xx and JSON containing a "link" field holding the published URL. AI Rank Lab reads it back to start tracking whether the page earns AI citations.
5. Start from the reference receiverintegrations/node-receiver is a short, complete Express implementation of all four rules. Run it locally and point a webhook at it to watch a real publish land before writing your own.

Testing Before You Go Live

See and sign the real request without sending it

1. Preview the payloadClick "Preview payload" next to any webhook to see the exact headers and body that would be sent, with secrets redacted. Nothing reaches your endpoint.
2. Dry runThe "Dry run" button builds and signs the genuine request and stops short of sending it. Use it to confirm every field is populated before a real article goes out.
3. Check the publish logEvery attempt is logged with the response status and body. A failed send is retried automatically after 1, 5 and 15 minutes; a 4xx is treated as final because your endpoint understood the request and rejected it.

Brand Name & Voice

How the writer learns what your brand is actually called

1. It reads your websiteOn first use, AI Rank Lab reads up to twelve pages of your site and pulls the brand name from your Organization schema, og:site_name tag or page title suffix — wherever you already publish it.
2. Check it in the Brand panelThe Brand panel beside the article shows the resolved name and where it came from. If it says the name was guessed from the domain, set it by hand.
3. Corrections are permanentA name you set yourself is marked as an override, so re-reading the website will never overwrite it.
4. Mentions stay honestThe writer mentions your brand at most three times per article, only where it genuinely belongs, and never as an advert. Zero mentions is a valid outcome. It may only cite proof points found on your own site.

Learn it step by step in the Academy

Free lessons that walk through this feature with examples, costs and a short quiz.

• Connect WordPress
• Custom webhooks for any CMS
• The WordPress plugin

Related pages

• WordPress integration
• All integrations
• Content optimization
• REST API reference