Context
Niche: B2B SaaS (developer tooling).
Market: United States.
Starting point: in-house content team of 2 (writer + editor) producing ~6 articles/month. Backlog of 280 unwritten article ideas from keyword research. Hiring more writers wasn't an option.
Goal
Triple output without expanding team or sacrificing quality. Articles needed to retain technical depth and survive Google's Helpful Content scrutiny.
What we did
1. Pipeline design
Mapped human work into 6 discrete stages: keyword brief → outline → draft → technical check → SEO polish → publish. Defined which can be AI-assisted and which stay human.
2. AI agents per stage
4 specialized agents on Claude 3.5 Sonnet:
- Briefer — turns a keyword into a detailed brief (intent, sub-questions, competitors to beat).
- Outliner — generates H2/H3 structure with key talking points per section.
- Drafter — writes first draft following the outline.
- SEO polisher — applies on-page best practices: meta, schema, internal links.
3. Mandatory human steps
Technical accuracy check by domain expert (always human), final editorial review, code samples verification.
4. Quality gates
Every draft scored automatically on: factuality (cross-check claims with sources), originality (vs. competitor articles), depth (word count + concept coverage). Drafts below threshold → rejected and re-generated with feedback.
5. Continuous improvement
Weekly review of published articles' Google performance. Best-performing patterns fed back into agent prompts.
Results
| Metric | Before | After 6 mo. | Δ |
|---|---|---|---|
| Articles published/mo | 6 | 18 | ×3 |
| Team size | 2 | 2 | = |
| Avg. time per article | 22 hr | 4 hr | −82% |
| Articles in top-10 (6 mo. after publish) | ~40% | ~52% | +12 p.p. |
| Cost per published article | $1,500 | $310 | −79% |
Timeline & budget
3 months build + 3 months optimization. LLM costs: ~$450/mo at 18 articles. ROI achieved in month 4.
What was tough
The Drafter agent produced grammatically perfect but generic content in early iterations. Solution: added "voice anchors" — short excerpts from the client's best-performing articles as few-shot examples. Quality improved measurably; the editor went from "rewriting 60%" to "editing 15%".