What this is: A guide to the optional Research stage, what it produces, how to decide whether to run it, and when to go deep versus skip it entirely.
The Research stage is optional. You turn it on with the Enable research phase checkbox in the Outline stage. When enabled, it runs after the Outline is approved and before the draft is written.
When research runs, the stage shows structured findings you can review and correct:
You can trim or correct these findings before approving.
Gotcha: Once you approve (and lock) the Research stage, its findings become read-only. You can no longer edit them in the editor.
Source links are checked in the three places the agent writes them: the chat message, the draft in the workspace panel, and the article when it's saved to your library. A link is only kept if the page could actually be opened and returned a working page.
That's stricter than checking for a "404" message. A page that quietly redirects to a homepage, one that returns a "not found" screen while technically reporting success, or one that simply won't load all count as unusable.
When a source doesn't pass, the claim and the source's name stay. Only the link is removed. So you might see "Spend rose 12% (Gartner)" with no clickable link rather than the claim disappearing. That's deliberate: you keep the research, and nothing sends you or your readers to a dead page.
If a source you know is good shows up unlinked, ask the agent to open it directly ("read this page and cite it") and it'll be verified and re-linked.
The agent is also told when a link was removed, so on its next pass it will normally go and find a replacement it can open rather than leaving a source named but unbacked. It should never hand you a list of sources with a warning that they are "reconstructed" or "worth double-checking". If it cannot open a page, it is not supposed to cite it at all.
There's one exception in the other direction. Some sites block automated readers outright, and the platform uses a separate reader to get past that. While that reader is unavailable, a blocked page can't be told apart from a dead one, so those links are kept rather than removed, because stripping them would delete exactly the hard-to-reach sources that are worth citing. So a link being present isn't proof on its own that the page was read; if it matters, click it.
Links you add or edit yourself in the editor aren't checked, and neither are links in content that was saved before this was introduced.
You can't re-run research from the editor. If you need different findings:
See Chat vs. the pipeline for when to reach for chat instead of the editor.
Research doesn't have to start in the pipeline. If you research a topic in a chat, the Research agent offers to save it to your library when it's done. Saving creates a content project with:
So the usual order is inverted: instead of brief first and research later, you explore first and the brief falls out of what you found.
Open the project from the Library and click the Research tab to see the findings. You can trim or correct them there straight away, the same as research the pipeline generated.
Gotcha: Approving the Outline on one of these projects will not overwrite what you saved. The pipeline sees the findings are already there and takes you to the Research stage to review them instead of researching again.
If you'd rather it did run its own research, unlock the Research stage first, which clears the saved findings.
The same applies when what you save is a brief rather than the research notes. If the assistant searched the web while putting the brief together, those findings travel with it: the saved project opens on the Brief, and its Research tab already holds the sources behind it. You don't have to save the research separately.
Two things to know:
A brief that genuinely had no research behind it, one you wrote from pasted notes or from your brand knowledge, saves exactly as before and leaves the Research tab empty.
Research adds quality but also time. Use these rules of thumb:
Turn research ON / go deeper for:
Skip research for:
In those cases research mostly just adds time without much payoff.
Tip: If accuracy is critical, keep Autopilot off so you can trim or correct the findings before they flow into the draft.
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