How AirOps Playbooks Work: Creating Action Agent
Knowing which pages need a refresh is only half the problem. Aaron shows you how to build a Playbook that picks up those signals and delivers surgical, on-brand content updates from diagnosis to final draft.
What You'll Learn
This lesson walks you through building an Action Playbook that takes refresh recommendations from your scout and turns them into fully updated content. You'll learn the end-to-end system: analyzing your target page, researching the competition, diagnosing gaps, building a refresh brief, and applying edits that stay on brand.
The Scout-Action System
In the previous lesson, you built a Scout Playbook that identifies refresh opportunities and sends them to a Grid.
The Action Playbook picks up those recommendations and executes the refresh.
Together, the Scout Playbook and Action Playbook form a continuous content optimization loop powered by your AirOps data.
Game Plan for the Action Playbook
Aaron breaks the refresh process into five stages:
- Read and analyze the target page.
- Research top-performing pages across AI and Google search.
- Identify gaps and missed opportunities.
- Build a refresh brief based on those insights.
- Apply the updates to the article.
The Playbook takes three inputs: the target page URL, your Brand Kit, and the primary keyword.
Section A: Analyzing Your Target Page With Page360
Page360 is an AirOps tool that packages a complex analysis workflow into a single step.
It produces a structured report covering your page's content, performance data, and signs of staleness.
Without Page360, you'd need detailed instructions for each data source and analysis method. Page360 handles all of that in one pass.
Section B: Researching the Competition With Page Versus
Page Versus is an AirOps tool that identifies top-performing articles across AI and Google search results for your target keyword.
It extracts related prompts from your article, finds the highest-performing competing pages, and breaks down their content, structure, and metadata.
The output gives you a clear picture of the competitive landscape and the topics driving visibility.
Section C: Diagnosing Gaps and Opportunities
At this stage, the agent has two reports (Page360 and Page Versus) and needs to turn raw data into a structured list of issues.
From the Page360 report, pull out:
- Performance history (framing the refresh objective, such as declining impressions)
- Missed prompts and keywords (semantic gaps to capture)
- Outdated references and broken links (quick wins that improve quality)
From the Page Versus report, analyze:
- Search intent (who the target reader is and what questions they're asking)
- Topic inventory (key themes, keyword clusters, and FAQs competitors cover)
- Structure and organization (how competitors sequence content and how their depth compares to yours)
This step does not make decisions. It extracts and organizes evidence, producing a list of gaps where each item is backed by data and tied to a specific section of your article.
Section D: Building the Refresh Brief
The first step is connecting your Brand Kit so the brief reflects your brand voice, products, positioning, and target audience. Without the Brand Kit, the agent can still produce content, but it risks sounding generic. With it, the agent makes informed choices about what to say and how to say it.
Next, the agent prioritizes the gap list using a decision framework:
- Mandatory fixes: stale references, broken links
- High priority: items backed by multiple signals and competitors
- Medium and low priority: only included if they fit naturally in existing content
This keeps the brief tight and targeted instead of producing a bloated rewrite.
For each section of your article, the agent recommends what to keep, edit, remove, or add.
The output is a section-by-section proposal with recommended edits, the rationale behind them, and any links to include or fix.
Section E: Applying the Updates
The agent references the writing guidelines in your Brand Kit. Earlier the Brand Kit informed the content strategy. Now it ensures writing quality, including voice, author persona, and writing rules. New content should read like a natural extension of the existing article.
The agent executes the outline section by section, with explicit instructions for handling each type of change.
- For internal links, the agent scans your sitemap for pages that are relevant, current, and add new value.
- For external links, the agent uses the parallel AI web search tool to find credible sources that support your claims while avoiding competitor domains.
The final output is a fully refreshed draft, ready for review.
Reviewing Results and Providing Feedback
After the Playbook runs, the left panel displays all artifacts: the Page360 and Page Versus reports, the opportunity list, the refresh brief, and the final article draft.
You can trace the agent's activity to understand its decisions and adjust your Playbook.
Aaron shows how to provide feedback in natural language through the chat. For example, asking the agent to add a key takeaways section. The agent can update both the current draft and the Playbook itself, so future runs include the fix automatically.
Connecting the Action Playbook to Your Grid
Once the Action Playbook is built and tested, connect it to your Grid of approved pages.
Add a Playbook column to the Grid, select the Content Refresh Playbook, and map its inputs to Grid columns (target URL, Brand Kit, primary keyword).
From there, every approved page in your Grid can be refreshed through the same automated playbook.
Key takeaways
- Separate Diagnosis From DecisionsThe gap analysis step extracts and organizes evidence without recommending any changes. It produces a data-backed list of issues tied to specific sections of your article. Decisions about what to fix, skip, or rewrite happen later in the brief, where priorities are clear and context is complete.
- Prioritize Gaps Like a Triage SystemNot every gap deserves the same effort. Mandatory fixes (stale references, broken links) come first. High-priority items need multiple signals and competitor backing. Medium and low priorities only earn a spot if they fit naturally into existing content. This keeps your refresh surgical instead of sprawling.
- Page Versus Pulls Prompts, Not Just KeywordsPage Versus extracts related prompts directly from your article and analyzes both AI results and Google results together. You get a competitive picture built on the questions people are actually asking, not just the keywords you're targeting.
- Feedback Updates the Playbook, Not Just the DraftWhen you give the agent feedback through the chat, it can edit the Playbook itself. That means your correction applies to every future run automatically. One piece of feedback compounds across dozens of refreshes without you repeating yourself.
- Internal and External Links Use Different Search StrategiesFor internal links, the agent scans your sitemap to find pages that are relevant, current, and add new value. For external links, it runs parallel AI web searches to surface credible sources while filtering out competitor domains. Each link type gets a purpose-built discovery method.
FAQs
A content refresh Playbook is an automated, agent-driven workflow in AirOps that analyzes underperforming pages, diagnoses content gaps, and generates section-by-section refresh proposals. Unlike manual content audits, a Playbook combines performance data, competitive analysis, and Brand Kit governance into a single automated process. You configure the analysis steps once, and the Playbook runs across your entire content library through a connected Grid.