What is the Editorial Advisor?
The Editorial Advisor is your real-time newsroom assistant. It looks at the last 72 hours of your traffic and tells you which stories to write today, based on your site's authority and what's trending on Google.
It answers the questions editors ask during the day:
Which topics are taking off and need a follow-up?
Which topics are done and should be dropped?
What's breaking in the topics you cover that you haven't written about yet?
What new angle could I take next?
Where to find it
The Editorial Advisor is part of your Real-Time dashboard. You can access it from three places
In the CMS left sidebar, under Analytics, click Realtime. This opens the real-time dashboard. At the top of the dashboard, next to Article, Sources, Tags, and Authors, open the Editorial Advisor tab.
In the CMS left sidebar, under Analytics, click Editorial Advisor. This will directly open the Editorial Advisor tab on the Realtime dashboard.
From the articles page, click on Editorial Advisor button to directly open the Editorial Advisor tab on the Realtime dashboard.
Your latest briefing loads. The header shows when it was last made (a time and an "X ago" badge). To make a new one, use the Run again button in the top right.
How it works
When you run the Editorial Advisor, it:
Finds your trending topics and shows you which of your articles belong to each one. Then it reads each topic's momentum — is it rising, peaking, fading, or quiet?
Searches the live web around your strongest topics to find follow-up angles you haven't published yet.
Looks for blind spots: stories your competitors covered that you missed.
Writes you a short editorial briefing that brings it all together.
Everything is based on your own publication: the topics you cover, your best headline styles, and your real traffic. The web-search ideas come from real, recent articles (with sources), and they leave out angles you've already covered.
What you'll see: the tabs
The briefing has two tabs: What's Trending (see the situation) and Recommended Actions (act on it).
Tab 1 — What's Trending
This tab shows what is moving right now and what to do about it.
Executive summary — a short briefing: the one thing to know, a few actions for today, and a clear "stop covering this" note for stories that are done.
Topics — one card per active topic. Each card shows the topic's momentum (such as Rising, Peaking, or Fading), its stage (such as Developing or Single spike), how many articles it has, and one recommended action. Open a card to see:
its Discover and Search totals,
a timeline showing Discover and Search visits for the articles in this topic over the last few days,
the articles in the cluster with their visit numbers,
a Discover trend (is the hourly rate going up or down?),
a Search signal (does Search demand agree with Discover?),
an already covered list of the angles you have published, so you don't repeat them,
a risk note for anything that could skew the picture, and
a short list of follow-up article ideas that link to the Recommended Actions tab.
Standalone high performers — single articles that did very well on their own, with their Discover, Search, and total numbers and a note on why they did well.
Data details — the traffic numbers behind the report, which you can open for full context.
Tab 2 — Recommended Actions
This tab turns the situation into story ideas you can use. A filter row at the top lets you see All ideas or pick one topic. There is also a New topics filter for blind-spot ideas, and a count of how many ideas were made.
Each idea is a card with one of these labels:
Sourced opportunity — an outside story worth covering from your own angle (the card shows the source and its publish date).
Original angle — a fresh, unpublished angle you could break first (no outside source).
Open any idea to see the full reasoning:
What it says — a summary of the source story.
Why not yet covered — how it differs from what you have published.
Why this can work well — linked to your strong topics and entities.
Headline direction — a suggested headline, often based on your own headline rules.
Differentiation — how to make the story your own.
Expected payoff — the traffic you can expect, based on similar past articles.
Who qualifies
The Real-Time feature must be active on your account. The Editorial Advisor runs only on your live traffic data.
It also needs current activity to give good advice, so its requirements are higher. In general, your site needs:
a steady publishing pace (about 3 or more articles per day on average),
a good share of articles that get Discover traffic, and
enough fresh activity in the last 72 hours.
If there is not enough recent data, a run will stop and tell you, instead of giving weak advice. Try again once you have published more.
How long it takes, and what if it fails
A run usually finishes in 20 to 30 minutes. The page shows a working state while it runs, then shows your finished report when it's ready. You can wait on the page or come back later.
If a run fails, click Run again. If the problem persists, contact our support team and we'll look into the cause and fix it for you.