Mentionwell

This is the long-form version of the Quickstart. It covers what to do inside Mentionwell as well as on your destination site, and what to expect at each step.

1. Onboard the site

In the dashboard, click Onboard a site on the Portfolio screen. Enter the site name and the destination domain (e.g. drabinskyrealty.com).

Mentionwell runs a 60-second onboarding job that:

  • Crawls the homepage, sitemap, robots.txt, and structured data.
  • Detects the framework, blog path (/blog by default), and CMS signals.
  • Writes a starter brand profile: audience, voice, pitch rules, CTA, blocked competitors.
  • Builds a content taxonomy (clusters tied to revenue topics).
  • Seeds 10 starter headlines.

You can watch progress in real time. When it finishes, you land on the Ship tab.

2. Review the brand profile

Open Settings → Brand / Audience & Voice / CTA. Skim what onboarding wrote and tweak anything that sounds off — especially:

  • Audience segments — who you're actually writing for.
  • Tone tags — how you want articles to sound.
  • Pitch rules — non-negotiables (e.g. "never mention competitors by name").
  • CTA text + URL — the action every article should drive.

The writer reads these on every draft, so a 2-minute edit here pays off forever.

3. Approve your first article

Open Overview → Articles to see the unified pipeline. Each row is a headline; the Status column shows where it sits (proposed → approved → drafted → published).

To ship one:

  1. Find a proposed headline you like.
  2. Click Approve in the Headline Pipeline. Mentionwell enqueues a draft.
  3. Wait ~60–90 seconds for it to land.
  4. Open the draft and click Publish.

The post is now live on the Mentionwell API. Your destination site will pick it up on its next revalidation (or instantly if you wire webhooks).

4. Wire your destination site

Pick the path that matches your stack:

All paths read the same three env vars (MENTIONWELL_API_URL, MENTIONWELL_SITE_SLUG, MENTIONWELL_API_KEY) and call the same two endpoints.

5. Optional: instant publishing via webhook

By default the destination site revalidates on a timer (5 minutes is the default). If you want zero-second publishing:

  1. In Settings → Delivery, set the revalidate endpoint to /api/mentionwell-revalidate on your destination.
  2. In the destination repo, implement that endpoint to verify the HMAC signature and revalidate the right paths. See Webhooks.

6. Turn on autopilot (optional)

Once you trust the output, flip Autopilot on in Settings → Automation:

  • Schedule headlines per week (1–7).
  • Pick publish days (UTC).
  • Toggle Auto-publish to skip the manual approve step.

The autopilot worker runs every hour. On each tick it checks each site with autopilot on, picks eligible headlines for today's slot (per the publish-days/hour you set), and runs the full plan → write → critic → publish flow.

7. Verify in production

  • Visit https://yourdomain.com/blog — your posts should be there.
  • Visit https://yourdomain.com/blog/[a-slug] — full article should render.
  • Submit https://mentionwell.com/api/sites/{siteSlug}/sitemap.xml to Google Search Console.
  • Add the RSS link to your site <head>:
    <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml"
      href="https://mentionwell.com/api/sites/{siteSlug}/feed.xml" />

Troubleshooting

Symptom Most likely cause
/blog is empty Env var missing on the running deployment, or the wrong slug. Confirm in your hosting dashboard.
401 from the API API key wrong or rotated. Re-copy from Ship.
404 on a slug The post isn't published yet. Check the Articles tab.
Article looks broken The detail endpoint returns html ready to inject. Don't double-sanitise it. See Styling & theming.

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