Approval gating

AugRank writes and publishes. Approval gating is the switch that decides whether it asks you first — and it is on, for everything, from the moment a site is added.

What it covers

Four kinds of change, each with its own switch, set per site rather than per account:

Publishing a new article.
Changing a page’s title or meta description.
Adding internal links between pages you already have.
Technical fixes — alt text, schema markup, sitemaps.

A change of any of those four kinds waits in your approval queue until a person decides on it. Nothing else in the product publishes to your site, so this is the whole surface, not a subset of it.

Everything starts switched off

Turning gating off for one kind of change is a deliberate act, and it is the only thing that turns it off. A site that has never been through the setup wizard, a setting written by hand, a value that is empty or malformed — all of them read as gated. The code is written so that the only way to auto-publish is a stored, explicit yes, because the alternative — treating a missing setting as permission — would have auto-published for every site nobody had configured.

The wizard asks once, and you can change it later. Step 2 of setup sets the default for your first site. After that it lives in Settings, per site and per change type.

What you see when it asks

Every item in the queue arrives as a diff — what the page says now, what it would say — with the reasoning that produced it attached. You approve it, edit it first, or reject it. Rejecting is a decision the agent records and works from; it is not a delete.

Who can approve

Anyone on your team whose role can approve content. You can narrow that to owners only, and narrowing is the only direction the setting moves: it cannot grant approval to a role that does not otherwise have it, because a settings screen that could widen permissions would be a permissions bug in a different coat.

Nothing is approved by a timeout

A draft that nobody looks at waits. Indefinitely, if that is what happens — there is no window after which AugRank decides for you, and there is no configuration that would add one. What you can set is a reminder: after so many days, an item still waiting is flagged as stale and you are told about it. The reminder reminds; it never decides.

Turning it off

You can, per change type, per site — and the product will tell you what each one lets it do before you do. Most people leave publishing gated and let the technical fixes through, which is the split the two halves were designed around: a broken sitemap entry is not a sentence anybody wants to read a diff of.

Whatever you choose, spending is capped separately and is never covered by this setting. Turning gating off does not turn the budget ledger off. What AugRank does lists both, and the pricing page answers the two questions people ask about them most.