Editing an article

Every finished article may be edited directly in RankYak. The article page is itself the editor: click into the text and start typing. Edits are saved automatically, kept in a revision history, and pushed to your site only when you choose to publish them.

Of course, you may also edit a published article in your own CMS instead. Keep in mind that RankYak's copy does not know about changes made there, so anything RankYak later pushes to your site, for example after an article refresh, starts from RankYak's version. Edits you would like to keep are safest made in RankYak.

The editor

The toolbar above the article covers the essentials: paragraph and heading styles, bold, italic, underline, lists, quotes, code, and undo. Selecting text opens a small formatting menu where you may also add or edit links, and typing / on an empty line opens an insert menu for headings, lists, quotes, tables, images, YouTube videos, and dividers. The article's title sits in its own field above the body, so editing it renames the article without touching the content.

AI edits

Sometimes you may wish to improve a passage without rewriting it by hand. Select the text and open AI in the formatting menu: Rephrase, Shorten, and Expand each open a small input where you may optionally tell the AI what to focus on, for example "focus on the pricing example", before generating. Custom instruction works the same way, except the instruction is the whole request: describe the change in your own words, for example "make this friendlier" or "mention the free trial".

The selected text shimmers while the suggestion is generated, and you may keep editing the rest of the article in the meantime. The suggestion then appears inline: the current text is struck through and the proposal shown beside it, with Accept and Dismiss buttons. Nothing changes until you accept, and an accepted edit saves and publishes like any edit of your own. Editing the selected passage yourself dismisses the suggestion.

Saving

Changes save automatically a few seconds after you stop typing, and immediately when you click away from the editor. The page header shows the save state, and afterwards a note such as "Last edit was 5 minutes ago".

Publishing your changes

Editing an article does not change your website immediately. When you edit an article that is already published, it is marked with an Unpublished changes badge and appears under the Needs republish filter in the article overview. When you are happy with the edit, click Publish changes to push the current version to your connected CMS; if you have webhooks enabled, a webhook is sent as well. Publishing runs in the background and typically completes within a moment.

If the site has no integration and no webhook, the button reads Mark as published instead, so you may record that you copied the changes over manually. For articles that have never been published at all, see publishing articles.

Revision history

RankYak snapshots an article's content before every refresh, rewrite, manual edit, and restore. After you have edited an article, you may open its history by clicking the last-edit note in the page header. Selecting a revision shows its changes as a diff against the current version, or as a full preview, and a Restore this version button reverts the article to it. The current version is saved as a new revision first, so a restore can always be undone. A run of consecutive manual edits shares a single revision, which keeps the history readable.

After restoring an older version of a published article, you should publish the changes to bring your site up to date.

Editing with the copilot

While an article is open in the editor, you may also describe an edit in the copilot, for example "update the part about pricing to mention the new plan". The copilot proposes precise edits to the article, and they appear inline in the editor in the same accept-or-dismiss form as AI edits, so nothing changes until you accept them. The copilot only edits the article you are viewing, so to edit another article, open that article first. Suggestions you have not reviewed are discarded when the page is refreshed; of course, you may simply ask the copilot again. Once an edit is accepted, you may publish the changes as described above, or ask the copilot to publish for you. The copilot can also restore revisions on your behalf.