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The Blog CMS is a blog that ChatFeatured hosts for you on a subdomain such as blog.example.com. Your articles are stored in ChatFeatured and the blog renders them from there, so there’s nothing to connect or sync. Use it if you don’t have a CMS, or don’t want to wire one up. You’ll find it under Content Hub → Configure → Blog CMS.

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Set up the blog

1

Create the blog

Open Blog CMS. Enter a Blog Title and a Description (shown in the blog header and used for SEO), then click Create Blog.
2

Configure it

The settings are split into tabs. Click Save Changes in the page header after editing any of them.
  • General: blog title, description, logo, favicon and footer text.
  • Theme & Layout: visual style, hub layout, article layout, colors and font.
  • Navigation: a button linking to your main website, header links, and social profiles shown in the footer.
  • Authors: the author profiles you can assign to articles.
  • Lead Capture: an optional form that collects leads from blog visitors, plus the list of submissions.
  • Domain: connect your subdomain (next step).
  • Verification: upload ownership files for Bing Webmaster Tools, Google Search Console and similar services (see Verification files).
  • Preview: see how the blog looks before it goes live.
3

Connect a custom domain

Open the Domain tab and work through its four steps: Website, Feed URL, DNS Setup, Verify. Details below.
4

Go live

Turn on the Activate switch next to the tabs (it changes to Blog Live), then click Save Changes. A View Live button appears in the header. The switch only turns on once the domain is verified.

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Connect a custom domain

The blog needs a subdomain of a domain you own. A root domain like example.com doesn’t work.
  1. Website: enter your website domain, for example example.com, and click Continue.
  2. Feed URL: the wizard suggests blog.example.com. Change it to any subdomain you like and click Continue.
  3. DNS Setup: at your domain registrar or DNS provider, add the record the wizard shows: The Quick guides in this step walk through Cloudflare, Namecheap and GoDaddy.
  4. Verify: click Verify DNS. When the record is found and the SSL certificate is issued, you’ll see “Domain verified successfully!”.
On Cloudflare, set the record’s Proxy status to DNS only (grey cloud) until verification succeeds. You can turn the proxy back on afterwards.
DNS changes can take up to 48 hours to reach everyone. If verification fails, check the record and click Try Again. Once the domain is verified, the blog is added to Website → Index Submissions, where we submit it to AI search engines directly.

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Publishing articles to the blog

Once the blog is live, it appears as a publish destination in the article editor next to any CMS integrations you’ve connected.
  1. Open an article and click Publish.
  2. Pick Publish to ChatFeatured CMS.
  3. In the Publish to CMS dialog, optionally pick authors and add Live URLs (other places the article lives, such as a LinkedIn post; they count toward citation tracking too).
  4. Click Publish.
The article goes live at https://<your-domain>/<article-slug> and shows up on the blog’s home page, newest first. ChatFeatured attributes AI citations of that page to the article.

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What an article puts on its page

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What happens when you publish, update, unpublish, schedule

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Verification files

Search engines verify site ownership by fetching a file from the site root. On the Verification tab, drop in the file they gave you and the blog serves it at https://<your-domain>/<file-name>. The blog also serves /sitemap.xml, which you can submit in Google Search Console.

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Troubleshooting

The Activate switch only turns on once the domain is verified. Finish the Domain tab’s steps, then turn it on and click Save Changes.
The CNAME record isn’t visible yet. Check the name and value against the DNS Setup step, then wait and click Try Again. On Cloudflare, make sure the record is set to DNS only.
The option only appears once the blog is live. Check that Blog Live shows next to the tabs and that you saved the change.

Articles

How articles move from idea to published, and the Content Calendar.

All integrations

Connect an external CMS instead.