Here is the brief most marketing teams actually send, reproduced in full:
Keyword: commercial HVAC maintenance cost Word count: 1,500 Due: Friday
Everything wrong with the post you get back on Friday is already visible in those three lines. The writer has been told what to type into a search box and how long to keep going. They have not been told what the reader wants, what already exists, or what your company knows that nobody else does.
So they read the top three results and produce a competent average of them, which is exactly what the brief asked for.
A usable brief has seven fields. Five of them take about ten minutes. Two of them are the entire job, and they are the two that get left out.
The template
Copy this. It fits on half a page and it is the whole thing.
1. Primary query. The exact phrase, as a person would type it. Not the category name.
2. The real question underneath it. Somebody searching “commercial HVAC maintenance cost” is almost never doing research for fun. They have a quote in front of them and they want to know whether $4,800 a year for a twelve-unit rooftop system is a fair number or whether they are being taken. Write that sentence out. It changes everything about what the post opens with.
3. What the top three results already say, and what they all miss. Open the results. Read them properly, not the meta descriptions. Write two lines on the consensus and one line on the gap. This is the part people skip and it is the only reliable source of an angle.
4. The first-hand thing only you have. A number from your own jobs. A pattern you have seen across clients. A mistake you watched somebody make. One is enough, and without one the post has no reason to exist.
5. Required internal links. Two or three, named, with the URLs. Left to the writer this becomes zero links or a link to the homepage.
6. The one thing that must appear. A price band, a checklist, a screenshot, a script. Something the reader could act on without you. If you cannot name it, the post is not ready to brief.
7. Who it is for and what they do next. One sentence each.
That is it. No tone-of-voice appendix, no persona document, no competitor matrix.
The two fields that do the work
Fields 3 and 4 are the brief. The rest is admin.
Field 3 exists because you cannot write something different from the top results without reading them. Every team I have watched skip this produced the same article as everybody else, then wondered why it did not rank. The gap you are looking for is usually mundane. Nobody gives a price range. Everybody assumes a building over 50,000 square feet. All three articles were written by vendors and none of them says when maintenance contracts are a bad idea.
Field 4 exists because it is the only input that cannot be generated. Anyone can produce the median article on any topic in about ninety seconds now, and the median article is worth roughly nothing. I went into why that happens in the piece on Google and AI-written content, and the short version is that the penalty is not for using the tool, it is for producing what everyone else produced.
So the field is not optional. If your subject matter expert will not give you fifteen minutes on the phone, you do not have a brief. You have a keyword.
Fifteen minutes is genuinely enough. Ask three things: what do customers get wrong about this, what did we learn the hard way, and what number would surprise them. Record it. Send the transcript with the brief.
What changed in 2026, and it affects field 6
Two findings worth putting into your template this week.
The first is about placement. Research into large language model citations found that 44.2% of them come from the first 30% of a page. Answers buried under a preamble do not get cited, because the machine reading the page does not scroll out of politeness.
So field 6 gets a placement instruction attached to it. The number, the price band, the checklist goes near the top, not in a payoff section at the end. The reader who wanted it leaves happy and the model quoting you has something to quote.
The second is more uncomfortable. Ahrefs found that in mid-2025 around 76% of pages cited in AI Overviews also ranked in the top ten organic results, and by early 2026 that had fallen to roughly 38%.
Ranking and being cited have come apart. You can be first on the page and absent from the answer above it. Nothing in the brief fixes that on its own, but it does change what you measure, because a post that gets quoted and never clicked is not a failure any more and your reporting probably still treats it as one.
So how many posts a month?
This is the question the brief actually answers, so let me be direct about it.
Fewer than you are currently planning, and each one properly briefed.
Four unbriefed posts a month produce four articles that average the competition. One properly briefed post a month produces something with a number in it that nobody else has, which is the only kind of page that earns links, gets quoted, and still works in eighteen months.
The volume target is popular because it is easy to put in a plan and easy to report against. It measures the thing you control rather than the thing you want. If your content is not working, the fix is almost never more of it.
Two a month, briefed like the above, beats eight of what most teams are publishing. If you have capacity for eight, spend the extra on updating what already ranks, which is consistently the highest return work in content and consistently the least popular.
Before lunch
Take the next post in your queue and add the two missing fields.
Open the top three results and write three lines: what they agree on, what they all skip, what you would tell somebody who read all three and still had the question. Then book fifteen minutes with whoever does the work and ask what customers get wrong.
That is about forty minutes and it is the difference between a post that exists and a post that gets cited. My notes on content marketing cover where this sits alongside everything else, and the argument for fixing conversion before buying more traffic is the same logic applied one step further down.
If you’d like to talk through your own content process, drop me a line on email, WhatsApp or LinkedIn and we can have a quick chat. I’m contracted full time so this isn’t a pitch.