This page explains how The Longer Answer decides what to cover, how a draft becomes a published article, and what to do if you think we got something wrong.
How topics are chosen
We aim for specific, long-tail questions rather than the broad head terms already owned by the large health and lifestyle publishers — the goal is to answer something those sites cover generically or not at all, not to out-rank them on their own ground. Each topic in our queue carries a stated editorial angle before a draft is written, so the piece has a point of view going in, not just a keyword.
Which sources we accept
Articles in our cycle and health clusters must cite sources, and those sources are restricted to a fixed allowlist of medical and governmental authorities: ACOG, NIH, NCBI, the CDC, womenshealth.gov, the NHS, NICE, the WHO, Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinic, Johns Hopkins Medicine, the MSD Manuals, Cochrane, ASRM, the Menopause Society, the Endometriosis Foundation of America, JAMA, The Lancet, and the BMJ. We prefer sources published or updated within the last five years; older sources are used only when nothing more current exists, and we say so. General web search results, forums, and other blogs are never used as sources for a factual claim.
How content is produced and reviewed
Most drafts start with an AI writing tool, then go through a fixed set of automated checks — minimum length, source coverage, keyword density, and a set of hard content rules that block dosing instructions, diagnostic claims, treatment-change instructions, cure claims, and a handful of other categories outright, regardless of what the draft otherwise says. A draft that fails those checks is marked rejected and set aside for a human to look at; it does not get a second automated attempt.
Nothing publishes itself. A person reviews every article before it goes live. For our health cluster specifically, that review has to come from a named, licensed clinician — the platform will not allow a health article to publish without one assigned, no matter how long it has been sitting in the queue.
What the Editorial Stamp means
Every article carries a stamp under its headline, in a monospace strip, so you can tell at a glance how it was handled:
- Editorial (plum bar) — our home, style, food, organization, career, money, and productivity coverage. Lower stakes; no source or clinical review requirement.
- Informational (ochre bar) — menstrual cycle and motherhood content. Sourced against the allowlist above and carries an on-page disclaimer that it isn't medical advice.
- Health content, medically reviewed (sage bar) — our highest tier. Sourced, disclaimed, and signed off by a named clinician, whose credentials appear directly in the stamp, before publication.
Corrections policy
When we get something wrong, we fix it in place rather than quietly deleting the article. Substantive corrections — anything that changes a factual claim or a recommendation — are noted with the date of the update. Typos and formatting fixes aren't logged individually.
How to report an error
Email contact@thelongeranswer.blog or use the contact form with the article URL and what you think is wrong. We read every report and will follow up if we need more detail.