AI Agent
Approval chain: sign off before anything goes live
Send drafts through Brief → Copy → Creative → Legal → Launch (or your own steps), with owners for each step. Agents cannot publish until every step is approved, and edits after approval need approval again.
The approval chain makes sure what agents (and, if you choose, people) publish has been reviewed by the right people first. It is off by default: turn it on in Project settings → Agent features → Approval chain.
Set up the steps
- 1Turn on Approval chain. The steps start as Brief → Copy → Creative → Legal → Launch.
- 2Rename, reorder, add (up to 10) or remove steps, and click people to make them a step’s owners. A step with no owners can be signed off by any project owner or admin.
- 3Press Save steps. New approvals use the new steps; approvals already in progress keep theirs.
- 4Optional: turn on Hold people’s publishing too (see below).
Submit something for approval
- Agents submit their own drafts when publishing is refused, and tell you which step it is waiting for. Related drafts (say, a week of posts) go in one approval.
- People use Submit for approval, shown next to the item in Content Studio (above the publish options), in the desktop app’s Studio panel, and in the desktop schedule dialog.
- Articles, landing pages, social posts and ad campaigns can be approved. The owners of the first step get a notification.
Review and decide
- 1Open Approvals from the notification, or go to /dashboard/approvals (desktop app: Settings → Approvals). “Waiting for you” lists the approvals whose current step you own.
- 2Open each item from its link to read it.
- 3Press Approve [step], or write a comment and press Request changes. A comment is required when asking for changes.
- 4Approving notifies the next step’s owners. After the last step the approval is complete and whoever submitted it is told it can be published.
Agents never approve
Only a signed-in person who owns the current step (or a project owner or admin, for steps without owners) can approve. Agents can submit and check status, nothing more.
Let clients approve
- 1In the step editor, people marked Client are your portal clients. Make one (or more) the owner of a step, for example Legal or Final sign-off.
- 2Turn on Client Portal → Sections → Approvals so they see the Approvals tab.
- 3When it is their turn they get a notification that opens the portal. The Approvals tab shows the actual copy of each item (clients cannot open your dashboard), with Approve and Request changes.
Saved to the knowledge base
When an approval completes, the approved text is saved to the project’s knowledge base as “Approved: ”. Agents, knowledge search and the claim check then treat it as approved wording for the brand.
Changes requested
The approval goes back to whoever submitted it with your comment. Once the changes are made, submitting the same items again continues the same approval from the step that asked for changes; earlier sign-offs are kept.
What is approved is what goes live
- Each item’s text is fingerprinted when it is submitted.
- If someone edits an item during review, approving it is refused until it is resubmitted, so nobody signs off on text that has since changed.
- If an item is edited after it was approved, it needs approval again before it can be published.
What waits for approval
- Agents: publishing to WordPress or a React site, publishing or scheduling social posts, and switching on an ad campaign all wait. Cross-posting inline text and writing ads straight into Google Ads are refused while the chain is on; agents are told to save drafts (or a draft ad campaign) and submit those instead. Saving drafts and WordPress drafts never waits.
- People (only with Hold people’s publishing too): publishing from Content Studio to WordPress or React, publishing and scheduling social posts (the posts, or the article they come from), and publishing ad campaigns.
- The Broadcast Studio workspace is held too: its posts are saved as drafts first, so they can be submitted, and posting or scheduling waits until they are approved.
See it in the log
Every refused publish, with the reason, appears in [Agent activity](/dashboard/help?article=agent-activity-log).