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How It Works

Understand how the Content Scout finds and generates content ideas for you.

How It Works

The Content Scout is an AI-powered agent that continuously monitors the topics you care about and surfaces fresh content ideas for your publications. Instead of spending hours scanning blogs, news feeds, and industry sites for inspiration, the Scout does it for you — so you can focus on writing.

What the Scout does

When you add topics to a publication, the Content Scout goes to work. It scans sources across the web that are relevant to your topics, analyzes what it finds, and uses AI to generate unique content angles you can turn into posts.

The Scout runs on a schedule in the background, but you can also trigger it manually whenever you want a fresh batch of ideas.

What you get for each idea

Every idea the Scout generates includes:

  • Title — A ready-to-use headline for the post.
  • Angle / Hook — The specific angle or unique take that makes this idea stand out.
  • Summary — A detailed overview of what the post could cover and why it matters.
  • Relevance score — A percentage score indicating how closely the idea matches your topics and audience.
  • Source links — The original articles, posts, or pages that inspired the idea, so you can reference them while writing.

The ideas flow

Here is how ideas move through your content pipeline:

  1. Scout generates ideas — The Scout discovers new content opportunities and adds them to your Ideas page with a “New” status.
  2. You review — Browse the ideas, read the details, and decide which ones are worth pursuing.
  3. Promote or dismiss — Promote the ideas you like into full writing sessions, or dismiss the ones that don’t fit your plans.

Once you promote an idea, Hot Metal creates a new writing session pre-loaded with the idea’s title, summary, and sources. The AI writing partner picks up from there and starts drafting based on that context.

Automated drafting

If you have set a publication’s publish mode to “auto,” the Scout can take things a step further. In auto mode, the Scout not only generates ideas but also kicks off the drafting process automatically — so you come back to find draft posts waiting for your review rather than raw ideas.

Next steps