A Practical Checklist for Reviewing an AI-Written Article Before It Goes Live

Start with facts, not phrasing

Before you worry about how an AI-written article reads, check whether what it says is true. Language models are built to produce plausible-sounding text, not verified text, and the two are not the same thing. A sentence can be grammatically perfect, confidently worded and completely wrong.

Go through the draft and flag anything that states a fact: a statistic, a date, a name, a claim about how something works, a reference to a law or regulation, a description of what a tool or platform can do. For each one, ask where it came from and whether you can verify it independently. If you cannot verify a specific number or study, either find a source or cut it. Vague is better than confidently wrong.

This matters even more for anything time-sensitive. Platform features change, pricing changes, algorithms change. An AI model trained on older information can describe something as current when it has since been updated or removed entirely. If the article references how a specific platform, tool or service works right now, check that against the platform's own current documentation rather than trusting the draft.

• Verify every statistic, study reference or named source actually exists and says what the article claims.
• Check dates, version numbers and platform-specific details against current, primary sources.
• Flag anything that sounds authoritative but isn't attributed. If you can't trace it, don't publish it.
• Be especially sceptical of round numbers and tidy statistics. These are often where models fill gaps with something plausible.

Sources: Documentation to Improve SEO | Google Search Central  |  Google for Developers

Check claims about your own business separately

If the article mentions your own products, services, pricing, guarantees or capabilities, treat this as its own review pass, separate from general fact-checking. AI drafting tools work from whatever brand information they were given, and that information can be outdated, incomplete or simply misremembered by the model during generation.

Go line by line through any sentence that describes what your business does, what it costs, what it includes or what it promises. Compare it against your actual current offering, not your website copy from eighteen months ago and not what sounds good in a sales paragraph. If a feature is in beta, say so. If a price has changed, correct it. Remove any outcome claims that your business cannot substantiate. This is the single most common way AI-assisted content quietly damages trust: not through obvious errors, but through small, confident overstatements that nobody caught.

• Confirm pricing, limits and billing terms against your actual current terms, not assumptions.
• Remove any outcome claims that lack written evidence and approval.
• Check that features described as available are actually live, not planned or in testing.
• Watch for enthusiastic language that quietly inflates a claim beyond what is true.

Read it for voice, not just correctness

An article can pass every fact check and still fail the most important test: does it sound like something your business would actually say? AI drafts have a tendency to default to a generic, slightly over-polished tone that is fine but forgettable. Smooth is not the same as distinctive.

Read the draft out loud, or at least read it as if you were a sceptical reader who has seen a hundred similar articles this week. Does it open with a real point, or with a throat-clearing paragraph about how something is important in today's landscape? Does it use phrases you would never actually say to a customer face to face? Generic AI writing tends to lean on certain tells: breathless enthusiasm, vague superlatives, and conclusions that simply restate the introduction in different words. None of these make an article wrong, but they make it unmemorable, and unmemorable content rarely earns a second read.

If your business has a defined voice, whether that is formal, witty, blunt, warm or technical, check the draft against it specifically. Where it drifts, rewrite the sentence rather than just trimming it. A rewritten sentence in your own voice is worth more than three paragraphs of correct but flavourless prose.

• Read the opening paragraph alone. Does it get to the point, or does it stall with generic scene-setting?
• Cut any sentence that could appear, unchanged, in an article from a completely different industry.
• Check for repetitive sentence structure. AI drafts often fall into a rhythm of short declarative sentences that becomes noticeable at length.
• Make sure the conclusion adds something, rather than simply repeating the introduction.

Test whether it actually answers the reader's question

It is easy for an AI-written article to look complete while being structurally hollow: good headings, reasonable paragraph lengths, confident tone, but no real answer underneath. Before you focus on polish, check whether the article actually does the job a reader came for.

Pick the exact question the article is meant to answer and read the draft purely looking for that answer. Could a reader who knew nothing walk away able to do the thing, understand the decision, or avoid the mistake the article promised to address? If the article talks around the topic without ever landing on specific, usable advice, that is a structural problem, not a wording one. Add a concrete example, a worked scenario, or a specific step rather than another paragraph of context.

Also check for padding. AI models, when asked for a certain length, will sometimes repeat the same idea in slightly different words to fill space rather than stopping when the point is made. If two paragraphs are saying essentially the same thing, cut one.

• Identify the one question the article promises to answer, then check it is actually answered clearly.
• Look for at least one concrete, specific example rather than only general statements.
• Cut any paragraph that restates a point already made elsewhere in the article.
• Check that headings reflect what the section actually delivers, not a vaguer version of it.

Check links, sources and anything that points elsewhere

If the draft includes links, citations or references to other sources, check every single one manually. AI tools can generate plausible-looking source names, article titles or even URLs that do not actually exist or do not say what the draft claims they say. A broken or fabricated citation is one of the fastest ways to lose a reader's trust, particularly if they click through to check it themselves.

This also applies to internal links on your own site. Confirm the page you are linking to still exists, still says what you think it says, and is actually the most useful page for that anchor text. Content gets updated or removed over time, and a link that made sense six months ago may now point somewhere outdated or irrelevant.

• Click every external link and confirm it leads to a real, relevant page that supports the claim made beside it.
• Verify that any named source, study or organisation actually exists and is accurately described.
• Check internal links still point to current, relevant pages on your own site.
• If a source can't be verified, remove the reference rather than leaving it unchecked.

Sources: Instagram Platform | Meta for Developers

Do a final read-through before it goes live

The last step is a straightforward, unhurried read from start to finish, ideally after stepping away from the draft for a while so you are reading it fresh rather than reading what you expect it to say. This is where small things surface: a heading that no longer matches its section after edits, a sentence that got cut off when something above it was removed, a claim that contradicts something stated two sections earlier.

If you have a colleague who was not involved in writing or editing the draft, ask them to read it too. A fresh set of eyes catches things the original reviewer has gone blind to simply from familiarity. This final pass is also the right moment to check tone consistency across the whole piece: drafts that have been edited in sections sometimes end up with a formal opening and a casual ending, or vice versa.

None of this means AI drafting tools are not worth using. They clearly are, for research, structure and getting past the blank page. But the review step is where a fast draft becomes a trustworthy, useful article, and skipping it is the most common way AI-assisted content goes wrong in public.

• Step away from the draft before the final read so you approach it fresh.
• Ask someone uninvolved in the writing process to read it before publishing.
• Check tone consistency from the first paragraph to the last.
• Confirm nothing was accidentally left half-edited after earlier revisions.