Routines
Routines are how SiteOps keeps working when you are not in the room. There is no separate scheduler app to learn — one panel on the Calendar, its Routines tab, holds both halves: the weekly beat, a cadence you set once (so many shorts, social posts and articles a week, plus an optional ads check-in), and standing orders, specific jobs in your own words that repeat on a rhythm you pick.
The beat feeds the planner. It keeps the next 14 days sketched as ghost items — faded entries on the Calendar marked Planned, with topics drawn from the search queries your site already ranks for. A ghost is an intention, not a finished draft: it shows you what the engine intends to make and when, and the moment you touch one it becomes a real item in the queue.
Standing orders cover everything the beat does not. A job is anything SiteOps should repeat, said plainly: give the agent a task in free words, generate a video batch, draft a blog post, draft social posts, or send an email — every day, every Tuesday, or monthly, at a time you choose. Whatever a run produces lands in a review queue. Nothing publishes by itself below the trust you set for that channel.
Routines answer 'when it is Tuesday'. Their sibling, sequences, answer 'when someone signs up' — flows that run on each person's own clock instead of the calendar's. A trigger event enrolls a person (optionally narrowed by conditions, like plan = free), steps fire at day offsets on a channel each — a day-0 welcome email, a day-3 nudge — and an exit event stops that person's remaining steps: reaching activation ends the welcome flow. Sequences are never a separate pipeline: enabled ones book their weekly batches into the same queue, on the Calendar, behind the same trust dials as everything on this page.
Set it up, step by step
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- Calendar
- Routines
- Calendar
- Routines
- The weekly beat
- Calendar
- Calendar
- Routines
- + Job
- Calendar
- Routines
If something does not work
- I set the beat but nothing showed up on the Calendar
- The beat can only plan onto connected channels. Shorts need a connected video channel and social posts a connected post channel — with none connected, those sliders have nowhere to put work. Articles go to your own site, so they plan regardless. Check your connections in Settings.
- Do ghost items publish by themselves?
- No. A ghost is the planner's intention — a faded Planned entry, not a finished draft. It does not count toward Needs you (unless flagged sensitive), and it only becomes real work when its run fires or you touch it. From that moment it is a normal queue item and follows the usual states.
- My routine ran — why didn't anything publish?
- By design. Runs produce drafts, not publications: video batches render into the Videos tab, blog and social drafts into Posts, emails and agent results onto the Calendar. Whether a finished draft then waits for you or books itself is the trust dial's call — at Approve first, everything waits.
- The assistant created a routine but it never fires
- Routines proposed from a conversation arrive switched off on purpose — a chat message should not silently start a repeating job. Open the Calendar's Routines tab, find it in the list and flip its switch on. Its next runs appear on the Calendar right away.
- I paused a job but one of its items is still scheduled
- Pausing stops new runs — future ghost occurrences vanish immediately. Anything a past run already turned into real work stays in the queue, because it was already yours to review. Skip it from the Calendar if you do not want it.
- Where did this 'Metric watch' row come from?
- You asked the assistant to keep an eye on a number — something like 'track my cost per purchase and ping me if it passes $5'. The watch checks that metric on its rhythm and speaks only when the value crosses the line you set — one ping on the way over, one when it comes back, and silence the rest of the time. It never invents a value: when the data behind the metric is missing, the check just skips. Pause it or delete it right here; to change the line, ask the assistant for a new watch.
- Should this be a routine or a sequence?
- Ask what starts it. A date or a rhythm — every Tuesday, monthly, 9:00 — is a routine: one run for everyone at once. A person's action — signup, a purchase, going quiet — is a sequence: each person gets the steps on their own clock, offset from their trigger day, and the exit event stops their remaining steps. Both land in the same queue behind the same trust dials, so the choice is about timing, never about safety.
- My sequence's Calendar row says ~0 people this week
- Honest math, not a fault: nobody fired the trigger event this week, or the narrowing conditions kept everyone out. The row stays visible so you can see the flow is armed and what it would send; the count fills in as real people enroll. If it stays at zero, check the trigger event actually fires on your site — the SDK panel in Settings lists every event that has arrived.