Marketing & GrowthFree
Content Draft Review Against Brief
The brief becomes a numbered checklist, every item gets a verdict and a located quote, and the words spent off-brief get counted against the gaps.
A generic quality rubric will tell you this draft is well written. It is. The brief asked for fourteen specific things and it delivers five of them. On Coldbrook's 1,780-word slotting piece, 684 words answer to nothing in the brief at all, which is 38.4% of the draft, while the worked example the brief allocated 300 words to was never written. Nothing in a rubric finds that, because a rubric never read the brief.
So the review runs in two directions. Every requirement in the brief becomes a numbered row with a verdict and the sentence in the draft that satisfies it, or the note that nothing does. Then every paragraph in the draft is checked back against the brief, and anything that answers to no requirement is counted. The nine open requirements need 508 words. The off-brief material is 684. The fix is a swap, not a rewrite.
Written for the content lead who commissions more than they can edit, the freelancer who wants the note before the invoice argument, and anyone inheriting a piece written to a brief they did not set. It reads best next to the content brief pack that produced the brief, the article built from a transcript when the source is a recording, and the content refresh pack when the piece already published. Editing comes after; this is the check that decides whether editing is worth starting.
Where the words actually went
The brief allocated its 1,600 words across seven sections, and comparing that allocation to what arrived is the fastest read in the review. Two sections came in at zero. Common mistakes was allocated 150 words and ran to 462. The opening is exactly the 120 words the brief asked for, with 214 words of history in front of it. Net, the briefed sections are 290 words short and the draft is still 180 words long. The two sections that came in at zero were allocated 480 words between them.
Treat the word target as a commissioning budget rather than a quality bar. Google says plainly that it has no preferred word count, so an argument about 180 words is the wrong argument to have with a writer. The useful arithmetic is the swap. Removing the 684 off-brief words and writing the 508 the open requirements need lands the piece at 1,604, four words over its commissioned length, with every requirement met.
Two checks catch what a rubric cannot. The brief named four sources; the draft cites two, and one of those is a trade write-up of a report the brief said to cite directly, so one source in four arrived as specified. The other is rehash: 152 words restating definitions the brief said to link to the glossary, which is the do not just rehash what others published problem applied to your own site.
How it works
Send both
The brief the piece was commissioned from, and the draft that came back against it.
Split the brief
Each instruction becomes one numbered, checkable requirement rather than a paragraph of intent.
Locate every one
Each requirement gets a verdict and the sentence that satisfies it, or a note that nothing does.
Price the gap
Off-brief words counted, missing words estimated, and the swap between the two written out.
What you get
- Every requirement in your brief as a numbered row, with a verdict and a located quote.
- Every draft paragraph checked back against the brief, so off-brief material is counted rather than tolerated.
- The swap priced: what to cut, what to write, and where the piece lands afterwards.
- The words the brief allocated per section against the words the draft actually spent.
- The sources the brief named against the sources the draft actually cites.
- A Sheet the writer can work straight down, and a Doc quoting the weak passages.
Common questions
Isn't this what an editor does?
An editor makes the piece good. This decides whether it is the piece that was commissioned, which is a different question and a faster one. Coldbrook's draft is well written and answers five of fourteen requirements. Sending it to editing first means editing 684 words that were always going to be cut.
What if the brief itself is vague?
Then the review says so per requirement, rather than marking the draft down for it. An instruction that cannot be checked is flagged as unenforceable and goes back to whoever wrote the brief. A brief with four of fourteen items in that state is a briefing problem, and pretending otherwise makes the writer pay for it.
Does the word count actually matter?
As a budget, yes. As a quality signal, no, and Google has said directly that it has no preferred length. So the review reports the overage once and stops arguing about it, then spends the rest of its attention on the 38.4% of the draft that answers to nothing in the brief.
Can the writer disagree with a verdict?
That is what the located quote is for. Every met requirement names the sentence that meets it, so a disagreement is about a specific line rather than about tone. Partial verdicts carry the word estimate for closing them, which turns three vague notes into 88 words of concrete work.
Does it check keywords and search intent too?
Only where your brief asked for them. If the brief named target terms, entities or a search intent, each becomes a checkable row like everything else. If it did not, the review does not invent a rubric, because a note the brief never asked for is a note the writer can reasonably ignore.
What about the sources the draft cites?
They get checked against the ones the brief named. Coldbrook's brief named four; the draft cites two, and one is a trade write-up of a report the brief said to use directly. Substituting secondary coverage for the primary document is the most common silent failure in a commissioned piece.
What actually gets delivered?
A Sheet with one row per requirement, its verdict, the located evidence and the words needed to close it. A Doc with the off-brief inventory, the section budget, the source check and the weak passages quoted. Patterns across several pieces belong in the editorial calendar pack.
Content Draft Review Against Brief
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