Intelligence is the screen that tells you what to do with the posts you've already published. Most blogs fail slowly, not loudly: articles that ranked stop ranking, two posts start competing for the same query, drafts sit half-finished. Intelligence surfaces those.

It reports across your whole account, or one blog at a time — pick a blog in the switcher at the top.

How the page is laid out

• Do next — everything below, ranked into one list across your blogs: the same ranking Joe answers "what should I do next?" from. Filter it to one kind of work (Fix, Rescue, Finish, Write, Refresh) and show more as you go.
• In Google — what Google did with each of your published posts: indexed, waiting for its first visit, not found, crawled but not indexed, or blocked. Needs Google Search Console.
• The worklists — Indexing, Refresh, Declining, Overlap and Stale drafts, one tab each, with the count on the tab. Every row carries the fix for it.

If a blog's Allow search engines to index this blog switch is off while it has published posts, a banner says so at the top, with a button to turn it back on. A blog with that switch off is invisible to Google however good its posts are.

What it flags

Indexing — published posts Google hasn't indexed, grouped by what fixes them:

• Hidden by a blog setting — the search-engine switch is off. One switch, one fix: Turn search back on.
• Blocked on Google's last visit — Google was told to stay away, but the blog lets it in now, so this is usually from before the setting changed. Re-check to see what Google sees today.
• Google couldn't load it — Google got an error (a 404, a server error) instead of the post. Open the page to see what a visitor gets, check the blog's site address, then re-check.
• Crawled, not indexed — Google read it and passed, usually because it's thin or too close to another of your posts. Strengthen it queues a refresh.
• Not found after two weeks — Google hasn't visited it yet. Link from older posts adds links to it from posts Google already crawls, which is how Google finds new pages.
• Waiting for Google's first visit — published in the last two weeks. That's normal, so it's folded away.

Re-check asks Google what it knows about the post now. It doesn't make Google crawl again — nothing can, for an ordinary page. Ask Google opens the post in Search Console, where Request indexing is one click. Posts are otherwise checked with Google a slice at a time each night, newest first.

Refresh candidates — posts that have aged out of accuracy or relevance. Refreshing rewrites the article while keeping its URL, so whatever ranking and backlinks it has earned survive the update.

Decliners — posts losing rank or traffic. This is the most valuable signal in the product and it needs Google Search Console connected to work properly; without it there's no rank data to detect a decline in. See Google Search Console.

Overlap (keyword cannibalisation) — two or more posts on the same blog competing for the same keyword. They split the signal and both rank worse than one good post would. Intelligence names them so you can merge, differentiate or redirect — or hand the group to Joe.

Stale drafts — work that was started and never finished.

Competitor themes and counter-angles — from the weekly competitor scan, based on the URLs set in each blog's settings. Counter-angles feed back into autopilot's topic planning, interleaved so every monitored competitor gets a hearing rather than the loudest one dominating.

Acting on it

Every insight has a fix attached — you can rewrite a decaying post straight from the dashboard rather than finding it, opening it and deciding what to do. Joe can do the same: "which of my posts are losing traffic?" then "refresh that one".

Getting the most from it

• Connect Search Console. Half of what Intelligence does is inference until it has real query data.
• Fill in competitor URLs on each blog. No competitors, no competitor intelligence.
• Give it a back catalogue. Intelligence is about existing posts, so it has little to say in your first month. If you've imported an existing blog, it has plenty to say on day one.

Related

• Analytics — first-party traffic figures, which work without any integration.
• Google Search Console — clicks, impressions, CTR and position.
• Autopilot — where competitor counter-angles end up as planned topics.