Mentionwell normally generates articles from your taxonomy + GSC data + AI search signals. When something happens now — a launch, an industry announcement, breaking news — you can override the planner and write a custom article from a pasted brief and source URLs you trust.

When to use it

• Breaking news: a story breaks in your space and you want to publish an article on it within minutes.
• Announcements: your own product launch, funding round, hiring news.
• Curated takes: you want to write an article off a specific report, paper, or source the planner wouldn't have picked.
• Hand-off from a human draft: an editor has notes / a brief; the writer fleshes it out into a full article.

For routine SEO/AEO content, don't use this — let the planner pick topics from your taxonomy and GSC.

How to start one

Dashboard → site → + New articles → Custom article tab.

Fields:

Field	What it does
Headline (required)	The title. Used as both the article title and the slug seed.
Context / brief	Paste anything: article text, your angle, key facts, quotes, dates. Treated as authoritative ground truth — the writer prefers this over web research when they conflict. Capped at 5,000 chars in the corpus.
Source URLs	One per line. Mentionwell crawls each with Firecrawl and includes them as authoritative sources.
Research mode	custom_plus_research (default) augments your context with supplemental web research. custom_only skips web search entirely — use this when your brief is complete and you don't want stray sources sneaking in.
Start writing immediately	When on, queues the writer job right after save. Otherwise the headline lands in your pipeline with status approved.

At least one of Context / brief or Source URLs is required.

How the writer treats your context

Under the hood, every stage of the pipeline (synthesize → outline → draft → reflect → metadata → FAQ) sees your pasted text and crawled URLs flagged as userProvided: true. The system prompts for those stages explicitly tell the model:

User-provided sources are authoritative. Weight their claims above web-crawled sources, surface their facts as keyInsights with high importance, and resolve any contradictions in their favor.

The custom brief becomes a synthetic user://brief source that sorts ahead of every web source in the corpus. Your URLs are crawled with Firecrawl and tagged the same way.

Pipeline flow

1. POST /api/sites/<slug>/headlines  { mode: "create_custom", title, customBrief, customSourceUrls, researchMode }
2. (optional) POST /api/sites/<slug>/draft  { headlineId }     ← Start writing immediately
3. Worker job:
     research → synthesize → outline → draft → reflection → metadata → FAQ → images
     Every stage sees userProvided sources as authoritative.
4. Article saved to blog_posts with published=true (when autoApprove=true).
5. Delivery fires per your delivery_config (webhook_push, api_reader, etc.).

For breaking news where speed matters, set Research mode to custom_only and leave Start writing immediately on. The writer skips web search entirely (which is the slowest stage) and writes directly from your brief.

API contract

If you're automating from a script or a webhook:

curl -X POST https://app.mentionwell.com/api/sites/<slug>/headlines \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer mw_pat_..." \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "mode": "create_custom",
    "title": "OpenAI ships GPT-6 with native video reasoning",
    "customBrief": "Paste the announcement text + your angle here...",
    "customSourceUrls": ["https://blog.openai.com/gpt-6"],
    "researchMode": "custom_plus_research",
    "autoApprove": true
  }'

Then trigger the writer immediately:

curl -X POST https://app.mentionwell.com/api/sites/<slug>/draft \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer mw_pat_..." \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{ "headlineId": "<id from previous response>" }'

Counts against your monthly article quota — same as any draft.

Quality tips

• Lead with the facts, not your opinion. The writer will write around what you give it; if you give it five contradictory takes, the article ends up muddled.
• Include exact names, dates, and numbers if precision matters — the writer will surface them verbatim.
• Set an angle once, briefly. "Frame this as a buyer's perspective" or "Focus on the SEO/AEO implications" goes in your brief, not in three paragraphs.
• For breaking news, paste the source article text rather than just the URL. Firecrawl-crawled content is sometimes truncated or behind a paywall; pasted text is always available.