Publishing and autopilot │ Rankfender Docs

Rankfender publishes to your site in two ways: the WordPress plugin and the Modern Web webhook. Connect one in Settings › Integrations (see WordPress and Modern Web). For any other site, copy or download the article, or pull it with the content API.

Publish an article yourself

Open the article
In the Writer, check the text and the featured image. Publish stays disabled until the article has one.
Pick a category (WordPress)
In the right panel's Integrations card, choose a "Category": "Auto (match by topic)" or your default.
Press Publish
The button reads "Publish to Wordpress" with WordPress, or "Publish" with the webhook. The notice "Article Published!" shows the live URL, and the article moves to Published.

Publishing by hand is not stopped by the quality gate: you are the reviewer. Publish each article from the Writer; Publish All in the Library only marks articles as Published in Rankfender and sends nothing.

What WordPress receives

Field	Where it goes
Title	The post title. The H1 is removed from the body so it doesn't appear twice.
Content	The post body. Forms, buttons and unsafe scripts are stripped first.
Excerpt and slug	The post excerpt and URL slug.
Featured image	Downloaded into the media library and set as the featured image. Inline images are copied too.
Category	The one you picked, or the default category.
Meta description	The description field of Yoast SEO, Rank Math, All in One SEO, SEOPress or The SEO Framework, whichever is active.
Target keyword	The focus keyword in Yoast SEO, Rank Math, All in One SEO and SEOPress, and a post tag.
Status	Published, unless the plugin is set to force its own default status.

What the webhook receives

Rankfender sends a POST with a JSON body to your webhook URL. Headers: X-Rankfender-Event: article.published, X-Rankfender-Domain, your authentication (API key, Bearer, Basic or webhook secret) and any custom headers you set.

title, slug, excerpt, meta_title, meta_description, keywords, author, published_at.
content: the article HTML, including its JSON-LD schema block.
featured_image: the image URL.
seo_data, custom_data (article ID, word count), article and domain objects.

When your site answers with a URL, it becomes the article's Published URL; otherwise Rankfender builds one from your domain and the slug. Full reference: webhooks.

How the autopilot works

Step	What happens
Plan	With Auto Content Planning on, the autopilot keeps the next 7 days filled with ideas from your keyword list, within your articles-per-day setting. One plan run creates at most 7 ideas.
Write	From 8:00 local time it writes the article scheduled for today. On Business and Agencies, with 2 articles a day, a second one follows from 14:00. Your monthly article limit is respected.
Publish	With Auto-publish on and an integration connected, it publishes today's articles, but only those that pass the publish gate.

An article the gate blocks stays a draft with the reasons logged; the autopilot does not retry it. Open it, review it and publish it yourself. The gate is explained in Quality review and the publish gate.

Turn on the autopilot

Connect your site
Settings › Integrations: WordPress or Modern Web.
Switch it on
Content › Settings: turn on Auto Content Planning and Auto-publish, and set Articles per day.
Check the calendar
Planning › Calendar shows the planned articles and the auto-publish status.
Review what was held back
In the Library, drafts with the QC status needs_review are waiting for you.

Tip

With Auto-index on Google (Professional and above, Search Console connected), each published article is also submitted to Google; the Library's Index column shows the result.