A B2B content brief should define the reader’s decision, the article’s argument, supported examples, exclusions, relevant links and the next action before drafting begins. Your template should connect audience needs to that assignment rather than stop at a keyword. Assign explicit approval separately from the intended publication date in approval-first mode.
What should a B2B content brief include before an AI-assisted article is written?
Start with the buyer’s question and the decision they need to make. The template below uses this article as an illustrative commissioning example; it does not describe a client engagement or measured outcome. Copy the prompts and replace the example with your own documented assignment.
At Recala, our document What Recala is and how it works describes checks of relevance, intent, existing coverage and available evidence before choosing the assignment. Fit the article to documented material, such as a company process or a dated observation. A keyword alone is not a brief.
Define an intended audience that would find the content useful even if they came directly to your business or site (Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content). Set the reader’s goal as the test of completeness: after reading, they should have learned enough about the topic to help achieve it.
A copyable brief template, with an illustrative example
| Brief field | Prompt to complete | Illustrative example: this article |
|---|---|---|
| Reader decision | Which buyer question will the article answer, and which decision should it support? | Decide whether a B2B article brief is complete enough to commission AI-assisted writing. |
| Argument and examples | What should the article explain, and which examples can the evidence support? | Explain how to connect an assignment to documented evidence; use this brief as the illustrative example. |
| Evidence intake | List company facts, primary sources, dates and author input. Distinguish company experience from public research. | Use Recala’s documented method and Google Search Central guidance. Attribute each to its source. |
| Claim boundaries | For each fact, record its source, subject, date, scope and permission. | Describe the stated commissioning method without claiming that it produced measured results. |
| Exclusions | Which questions or claims cannot be supported? | Exclude invented case studies, private datasets, customer outcomes and ranking guarantees. |
| Links and next action | Which links help the reader, and what should they do next? | Link to the cited guidance; ask the reader to complete and review the brief before commissioning. |
| Publishing permission | Who writes, who reviews, and who explicitly approves publication? | Andrés Naves is Recala’s named author and reviewer. Record approval separately from the schedule. |
| Publication handoff | How will you validate the structured data and fix critical errors? | Validate applicable Article markup with the Rich Results Test and fix critical errors. |
What evidence and author input should I collect before drafting?
Collect documented company facts, source and measurement dates, relevant primary research and author input. Ask the author to identify what the company experienced directly and which proposed statements come from public research it has read.
Ask that the content be written or reviewed by an expert or enthusiast who demonstrably knows the topic well (Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content). Its quality questions also ask whether content provides original information, reporting, research or analysis.
Make clear sourcing and evidence of expertise part of the assignment. Google’s Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content guidance identifies an author page or an About page as ways to provide background about the creator or publisher.
In the brief, identify each supporting document by name and preserve its date where available. Connect each source to the factual claim it supports. For the illustrative assignment, identify Google’s helpful-content guidance by name and date beside the factual sentence it supports. Ask the reviewer to connect each factual sentence to the named document and explain any mismatch in the brief. A link in a bibliography is a starting point for that check, not a substitute for connecting the passage to the claim.
How do I decide which claims and examples to leave out?
Use each company fact’s source, subject, date, scope and permission to determine what the article can say.
Reading or storing an external article does not turn its findings into your company’s experience. Without corresponding evidence, do not commission a case study or an own-data claim. A company without a private dataset can instead contribute a supported explanation, an honest opinion, a process or original analysis.
Choose the article form to fit that material, rather than asking the writer to supply the missing experience. A named author makes responsibility visible but does not turn an AI-assisted article into an account of experiences that person never had. Use a documented company process as the example in this brief, and leave any customer traffic claim out unless the company can document it. If the writer wants that stronger example, return the question to the commissioning owner: which approved record establishes the result, for whom, and over what period?
Ask the reviewer to check factual accuracy, including errors a reader could easily verify, as Google’s Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content guidance recommends.
What approval and publication checks should the brief specify?
Name the accountable author and reviewer. For Recala’s blog, Andrés Naves holds both roles, and approval-first publishing requires explicit approval. Specify whether the brief uses approval-first publishing, called Review each, or Autopilot.
Require accurate authorship information where readers would expect a byline (Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content). Consider an AI or automation disclosure when readers could reasonably expect an explanation of how the content was created. Check substantive freshness rather than changing the page date to make unchanged content appear fresh.
Assign the recommended Article properties that apply to the page. Include every author displayed on the page in its author markup. Google’s Article structured-data guidance says there are no required properties; add those that apply to the page.
Validate markup with the Rich Results Test and fix critical errors. Use datePublished to provide more accurate publication-date information to Google. Use dateModified to provide more accurate modification-date information.
Include a self-referential canonical on the intended canonical page. Use an absolute URL for that canonical. Point internal links to canonical URLs rather than duplicate URLs.
Check that robots.txt, noindex or login requirements do not block Google. After deployment, assign a URL Inspection check and allow time for recrawling and reindexing. Google’s Article guidance says discovery and crawling can take several days.
Sources
Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content, Google Search Central, 5 October 2026developers.google.cn
Article (Article, NewsArticle, BlogPosting) structured data, Google Search Central, last updated 8 September 2026developers.google.com
How to specify a canonical URL with rel="canonical" and other methods, Google Search Central, last updated 10 July 2026developers.google.com
