From zero to auto-publishing today. Here's how to get the most out of MadWords.
This guide walks through the MadWords dashboard. If you don’t have an account yet, start with 10,000 free words — no card required — and follow along. Stuck anywhere? Contact support and we will get you moving.
Get 10,000 Free WordsMadWords writes content designed to rank. But content is one step, not the whole game. Here are some things to do to get the best results with MadWords:
None of this is specific to MadWords. It is what ranking has always required, whether the words come from a tool or a writer. We tell you because we have run SEO campaigns ourselves and we would rather you win. The full reasoning is below.
MadWords writes from what you tell it. The more it knows about your business, the less there is to fix. The quality of your content is directly tied to the information you provide during Topic Setup.
MadWords researches every keyword, analyzes top-ranking pages, and builds articles from real data. But it can only write about your business, your products, and your audience if you tell it what those are.
The more detail you give in Topic Setup, the more accurate, specific, and publish-ready your articles will be.
This is the most important step. Everything MadWords generates is shaped by the information in your Topic. Think of it as briefing a writer — the more context you give, the better the work.
You do this once. A Topic is not per article and not per project. Build it once for a subject and it powers unlimited Bulk Write projects, unlimited Translate projects, Rewrite, and anything we add later. Twenty minutes here is twenty minutes total, not twenty minutes each time.
One niche, industry, or product line = one Topic. A Topic is not per site. If you write about six different subjects, you need six Topics, each with its own setup — because the description, products, and audience are different for each one, and that is exactly what makes the articles specific instead of generic.
Create as many as you want, there is no limit on Topics. What your plan limits is the number of domains you can publish to, translate, or rewrite.
| Topic Name | A short name for this project. Example: "Coffee Reviews" or "SaaS Marketing Blog" |
| Domain | The website where this content will be published. MadWords uses this to understand your site's context. |
| Industry | Your niche or vertical. Be specific — "Enterprise project management software" is better than "Technology." |
| Topic Description | This is where most people underinvest. Don't write "we sell coffee." Write "We're a specialty roaster based in Portland focusing on single-origin beans from Ethiopia and Colombia. We sell direct to consumer through our website and wholesale to cafes in the Pacific Northwest. Our audience cares about sourcing transparency and roast profiles." Give MadWords the context it needs to write like it knows your business. |
| Key Products or Services | List what you sell, with specifics. Include pricing if relevant, model names, plan tiers, service packages — anything a customer would want to know. The more detail here, the fewer generic placeholders end up in your articles. |
| Target Audience | Who reads this content? "Small business owners with 5-50 employees who are evaluating project management tools for the first time" is useful. "Businesses" is not. |
| Unique Selling Proposition | What makes you different from competitors? If you don't tell MadWords what sets you apart, it can't differentiate your content from everyone else's. |
| Audience Country | Sets language, spelling conventions, and cultural context. US content reads differently than UK or Australian content. |
| Audience Age Range | Affects tone, vocabulary, and reference points. Content for 25-34 year olds reads differently than content for 55+. |
| Competitors | List competitor websites. MadWords can reference these during research to understand your competitive landscape. |
If your Topic Description is less than 3-4 sentences, you haven't given MadWords enough to work with. Keep writing until you have covered your company story, what you sell, who you sell to, what problems you solve, and what makes you different. This single field has more impact on article quality than any other setting in MadWords.
The following details aren't all separate form fields — most go in your Topic Description or Products field. But the more of these you include somewhere in your Topic, the better your articles will be:
If you publish to WordPress, connect your site in your Topic so MadWords can publish straight to it. Publishing somewhere else? Skip this and keep your articles in MadWords instead.
| WordPress Site URL | Your site's full address, including https:// — for example, https://yoursite.com. |
| WordPress Username | The username you use to log in to WordPress. |
| Application Password | Not your normal login password. In WordPress, go to Users → Profile → Application Passwords, add one named “MadWords,” and paste the generated password here. It works on WordPress 5.6+ and can be revoked any time without affecting your login. |
With all three filled in, click Test Connection. MadWords checks that it can reach your site and publish to it — get the green confirmation before you run a batch, so a publish doesn't fail later.
It is almost always one of four things, and none of them mean you did it wrong.
Your site is not on HTTPS. WordPress disables Application Passwords on sites without SSL, so the section will not even appear in your profile. Get a certificate installed and it comes back.
Your server is stripping the login header. Common on Apache running PHP as CGI or FastCGI — the credentials never reach WordPress, so it rejects a request that was actually correct. Adding this line to your .htaccess usually fixes it:
SetEnvIf Authorization "(.*)" HTTP_AUTHORIZATION=$1
A security plugin is blocking the REST API. Wordfence, Solid Security, All In One WP Security and others all have settings that restrict REST API access or disable Application Passwords outright, and they are often switched on by default. Check the plugin’s settings and allow REST API authentication.
Your host restricts the REST API. Some managed hosts lock it down. Support can usually enable it if you ask.
Still stuck? Contact support and we will work through it with you. In the meantime you can select Keep It in MadWords in Bulk Write and publish manually — nothing about your account depends on the WordPress connection.
This is how you build topical authority — not just find a keyword here and there. Google doesn't only rank individual articles; it rewards sites that cover a topic completely. The Keywords tool maps the whole topic for you: enter a competitor URL and MadWords extracts every keyword they wrote about, plus headline ideas you can turn into articles.
Already have a keyword list? You can paste it straight into Bulk Write and skip this step. But keyword research is included in your plan, so there is no reason to leave it on the table — the gap analysis alone usually turns up terms a paid tool missed.
| Competitor URL | Enter any competitor's website. MadWords analyzes their content and extracts the keywords they wrote about. |
| Your Website | Optional. If provided, MadWords can identify keyword gaps — topics your competitors cover that you don't. |
A scan usually finishes in a couple of minutes. A very large site can take five minutes or more, and MadWords shows you the progress while it runs, so you are not guessing whether it is still working.
MadWords returns a deduplicated list of keywords and headline suggestions. Filter by length, sort, or pull the long-tail terms (3+ words) that are easier to rank for — if your site is new, start there. Then select the full set that covers a topic — not a scattered handful — and send them straight to Bulk Write to write the whole cluster at once.
Topical authority is how a smaller site outranks a bigger one: cover a subject so thoroughly that Google treats you as the authority on it. Pull a competitor's full keyword footprint, map every sub-topic they cover and the gaps they've left, then write the entire cluster — not scattered one-off posts. Do that and you start ranking across the board, not one keyword at a time.
Bulk Write is the fastest way to generate content at scale. Enter a list of keywords, select your Topic, and MadWords writes a unique, research-backed article for each one.
| Topic | Select the Topic you created in Step 1. This is what tells MadWords about your business. |
| Project Name | A label for this batch. Example: "March Coffee Articles" or "Competitor Gap Keywords." |
| Project Type | Keywords — paste a list of keywords, one per line. RSS Feed — pull topics from an RSS feed. |
Choose where your articles go after generation:
| WordPress | Publishes directly to your WordPress site via API. Select your connected site, choose a category, and set post status (draft or published). |
| Keep It in MadWords | No WordPress required. Articles are stored in your MadWords account, where you can edit them and then move or export them to any platform you want. |
| Articles Per Day | You set how many articles go live each day. MadWords writes the whole batch, then publishes at the pace you choose — 500 keywords do not land on your site at once. |
| Draft or Published | Choose whether articles arrive in WordPress as drafts for review, or go live automatically. Start with drafts on your first batch so you can see what you are getting. |
| Word Estimate | Before you start a project, Bulk Write shows you the estimated words it will use. You know what a batch costs before you commit to it, not after. |
Every project you run is recorded on the Bulk Write page. That is where you check progress, see what has been written, read or edit individual articles, and review anything still queued. Start a batch, close the tab, come back to the Bulk Write page later.
You don’t wait around for any of this. Articles publish on the daily schedule you set, and if you’re keeping them in MadWords rather than posting to WordPress, each one usually finishes in under two minutes. Start the batch and close the tab.
Leave word count on automatic unless you have a specific reason not to. Setting a minimum turns it into a target — the article reaches your number and stops, whether or not the topic was finished, which is how you end up with padding. Fixed counts are also approximate at best; the model aims at them rather than hitting them exactly.
On automatic, each article runs as long as the research supports. Some topics need 900 words. Some need 2,500. Letting the subject decide produces better articles than picking a number in advance.
Contact us and we will remove it. Send your business name, your domains, and what you are publishing, and for legitimate operations we lift the cap entirely.
This is a publishing limit, not a writing limit. MadWords writes your entire batch — load 500 keywords or 100,000 and they all get written. What is capped by default is how many go live on one domain each day.
The cap protects you as much as us. A brand new site publishing hundreds of pages in an afternoon looks unnatural, and it keeps the platform clean of the small number of publishers who use any content tool to push spam.
MadWords comes with a No Edit Guarantee. If an article needs editing — broken English, a bad fact, a translation that misses, a measurement that did not convert — report it and we credit your account with replacement words. We read every report, because we publish MadWords articles on our own sites too. Read the No Edit Guarantee →
For real SEO campaigns, Bulk Write is what you want. Load up to 100,000 keywords, hit generate, and come back to a queue of publish-ready articles. Every article is independently researched — no two are alike, even on similar topics. It's the difference between writing one post and building out a whole site.
The article is only half of what makes a page rank. That was true before AI writing existed and it is still true now — none of what follows is a MadWords requirement, it is an SEO requirement.
Most tools in this category never mention any of it. Either they don’t know, or a magic button is easier to sell. We have spent years doing this work on our own sites, so we would rather hand you the whole picture than leave you to find it out after a batch of articles goes nowhere.
AI content ranks. Lazy AI content doesn’t.
Ahrefs analyzed 600,000 top-ranking pages and found 86.5% contained some AI-generated content — but only 4.6% were fully AI-generated. Google has been consistent about this: they judge the quality of content, not how it was produced. What gets penalized is scaled content abuse, meaning mass-produced low-value pages built to game rankings.
MadWords is built for the right side of that line. Every article is researched independently and structured differently every time, so your site never leaves the templated fingerprint that gets flagged. We didn’t release it until it matched or beat the writers we were paying, measured on click-through, bounce rate, time on page, and conversions. Read a few unedited articles → and judge that for yourself.
What follows isn’t here to rescue the writing. It is here because a strong article on a faceless page, on a site with nothing behind it, still loses to a weaker article on a site Google already trusts. The writing is our half. The page and the site are yours.
A name, a photo, a two-line bio, and a link to an author page. Google’s quality systems lean heavily on E-E-A-T — Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trust — and a faceless page with no author is the most common thing separating AI content that ranks from AI content that dies. This costs you five minutes and matters more than almost anything else on this list.
You can generate a lot of articles quickly. That is the point of the tool. But the data is blunt about what happens next: sites publishing 50 to 100 AI articles with human oversight saw traffic climb 30 to 80 percent, while sites publishing 1,000 or more unedited articles saw traffic fall 40 to 90 percent. The difference was quality control, not AI. Start with a handful of pages a week and build up as the site establishes itself. Slow and steady beats a firehose every time.
Brand new domains with no backlinks struggle to rank anything, AI or human. Content gets indexed, ranks briefly, then fades without authority behind it. You do not need to be a huge site — you need some real links, some age, and a few pages worth linking to. If you are starting from scratch, spend some energy getting known, not only on publishing more.
It also changes what you should be targeting. On a new site, go after long-tail keywords — three or four words, lower search volume, far less competition. Those are the terms you can actually win in the first few months, and early rankings are what build the authority you need to compete for the bigger ones later. The Keyword tool sorts by length so you can pull the long-tail set out and start there.
Google doesn’t only rank individual pages — it decides which sites are authorities on a subject. Covering a topic more completely than anyone else is how a smaller site outranks a bigger one. Use the Keyword tool to pull a competitor’s full footprint, find the gaps they have left, and write the entire cluster rather than scattered one-off posts.
Then link the cluster together. Articles on the same subject should link to each other, because that is what tells Google the pages belong to one body of work rather than sitting there as unrelated posts. Do it by hand for now — we are building a tool to handle internal linking across your whole site automatically.
Write some of your site yourself, or add your own experience into MadWords articles — a paragraph of first-hand detail, your own test results, a photo you took. Structural variation solves the pattern problem, but it doesn’t make a site of entirely machine-written content into something else. Google’s quality systems reward demonstrated experience, and experience has to come from someone who had it.
If you write about health, money, or legal topics — Your Money or Your Life subjects — Google’s bar is much higher, and AI without demonstrated expertise struggles. In those niches a credentialed author, cited sources, and human review are not optional. Treat MadWords as your first draft and your research engine, then add the expert layer on top.
Connect Google Search Console and give it a few weeks. It will show you which articles are picking up impressions and which queries you are appearing for — and a lot of those will be terms you never targeted. That is the most useful information you will get, because it tells you what your site can rank for right now rather than what you guessed it could.
Write more around whatever is gaining traction, and use Rewrite on the pages that are close but not landing. Publishing is the first half. Reading the results and doubling down on what works is the half most people skip.
Researched, in-depth, well-sourced articles, structured differently every time so your content never reads as mass-produced.
A real author on the page, a pace that looks like a real publisher, and a site with some authority behind it.
Do your half and MadWords will more than do its half. That is the whole formula. It is not a magic button — nothing promising a magic button is telling you the truth — but it is a real edge, because most of your competitors are either paying a fortune for writers or spamming content Google throws away.
Built for people running six and seven figure content businesses. Chat with MadWords owners and other people running content empires. Your invite link is in your welcome email.
Translate and Rewrite aren't steps — they're optional tools after you have live content.
Translate your existing articles into other languages to reach international audiences. MadWords doesn't just translate word-for-word — it localizes content so it reads naturally in the target language.
| Topic | Select the Topic that contains the articles you want to translate. |
| Source | Choose which articles to translate — by WordPress category, specific articles, or all content. |
| Target Languages | Select one or more languages. You can translate into multiple languages in a single batch. |
Every translation project is recorded on the Translate page, the same way Bulk Write projects are. That is where you check progress and review what came back.
Bulk Write produces one version of each article, so set your Bulk Write project to the language you publish in and keep it there. When you want other languages, use Translate rather than writing the same topic again in Spanish or German.
The reason is hreflang. Translating creates a linked set — MadWords knows which post is the original and which are the versions, so the plugin can tell Google which one belongs to which country. Two articles written separately on the same topic have no connection to each other, so nothing gets linked and your own pages end up competing.
Translation quality is not identical across all 119 languages. The most widely used languages — roughly the top thirty — come out excellent. The further you get from those, the more variable the results, and that is a limit of the underlying language models rather than something we can tune around.
So translate one page into your target language first and read it, or have someone who speaks it read it. Once you know it reads well, run the rest. If something looks wrong, tell us and we will see what we can do — but find that out on one page, not after you have translated a thousand.
Broken English, a bad fact, a translation that misses, a measurement that didn’t convert — we look at every report, because we publish MadWords articles on our own sites too. Report it and we credit your account with replacement words. Then we fix what we can. Contact support →
If your audience is English-only, skip this step entirely. But if you serve international markets or want to expand into new regions, translation is the fastest way to multiply your content library without generating new articles from scratch.
Keep your content fresh by automatically rewriting sections of existing articles on a schedule. Google rewards content that gets updated regularly, and Rewrite handles this without you lifting a finger.
| Topic | Select the Topic containing the articles you want to keep fresh. |
| WordPress Category | Choose which category of articles to rewrite. |
| Paragraph to Rewrite | First paragraph, last paragraph, or one random paragraph. The rest of the article stays intact. |
| Rewrite Every | Set the schedule — every 1 to 6 months. MadWords automatically rewrites the selected paragraph on this interval. |
Most users set Rewrite to every 3 months on their core content categories. It signals to Google that your content is maintained and current, which can improve rankings over time — especially in competitive niches where everyone else's content is going stale.
Thirty unedited MadWords articles.
Read the articles →Everything included in every plan.
See all features →Plans, word packs, and what words cost.
See pricing →Write, localize and rewrite with no editing.
Read the guarantee →Why every MadWords article is structured differently.
Why it is Google-Safe →119 languages and 74 country variants, localized for each country.
See how it works →