Quickstart: your first article
Sign up, onboard, generate your first cited AI article, and publish it with EarlyForge.
Quickstart: your first article
This guide walks you through your first article with EarlyForge — from creating an account to publishing. No publishing destination is required to start; you can connect one later.
Prerequisites: A modern web browser and an EarlyForge account. Don't have one? Sign up here. Every plan includes a monthly AI word budget (5,000 words on Free) to get you started.
Create your account
Go to earlyforge.ai/auth/register and sign in with:
- Google, or
- Apple, or
- Email and password
If you sign up with email, you'll receive a verification link — click it to activate your account. You can turn on two-factor authentication (2FA) later in your account settings.
Land on your dashboard
That's it — no setup wizard, no plan to pick. You go straight to the dashboard on a Free plan, in your private personal workspace. You can explore trends, write articles, and upgrade whenever you want from Settings → Billing.
Nothing is created for you: "My Sites" starts empty. A site is optional for writing a standalone article, and required once you want briefs or publishing — you create one in a click when you're ready (see the next step and Create a site).
Start a new article
From the Dashboard, click New Article (or open Articles in the sidebar and choose New Article). An article can live in your workspace without a site — picking a site is optional.
You have two ways to begin:
- Write a brief — Describe what you want: a topic, tone and style, structure, and optional sources. A brief is a reusable content plan.
- Pick a trend — Open Trends in the sidebar to see what's emerging in your categories, then generate an article directly from a trend. EarlyForge surfaces trends before they peak, so this is a great way to publish early.
Either path leads into the same single generation flow.
Generate
Enter your topic (or confirm the one from your brief or trend), pick a tone and a target length, and click Generate. EarlyForge then:
- Retrieves the most relevant collected sources for your topic.
- Writes the article, streaming it paragraph by paragraph.
- Adds citations — inline
[1],[2]references that link to real sources.
The whole process takes about 75 seconds.
A word budget free, then your own key. Your monthly AI word budget runs on EarlyForge's managed AI at no cost (Free 5,000 · Starter 10,000 · Pro 25,000 · Scale 50,000 words/month, covering generation, the AI editor, and autocompletion). After that, paid plans connect their own AI key for unlimited generation (you pay your AI provider directly for usage). When you reach your word limit without a key on a paid plan, you'll see a clear prompt to connect your AI — generation never crashes. See Connect your AI.
Review in the AI editor
When generation finishes, you land in the AI editor, where you can:
- Edit any part of the text.
- Hover over
[N]badges to check each citation's source. - Ask the AI to rephrase, expand, or summarize a selection.
- Add or replace royalty-free images.
- Adjust SEO metadata (title, description, keywords).
Publish
When you're happy with the article:
- Click Publish.
- If you've connected a destination (such as WordPress), select it as the target.
- Otherwise, the article is marked as published inside EarlyForge.
You can always come back to edit or republish later.
What's next?
Now that you've shipped your first article:
- Create a site — Configure your workspace: style guide, destination, and team.
- Connect WordPress — Publish straight to your WordPress site.
- Connect your AI — Set up your own AI key for unlimited generation.
- Brief automation — Generate articles on a schedule.
Start with trends. For the freshest results, generate from a trend that's still emerging. EarlyForge scores trends 0–100 and tracks their lifecycle, so you can catch a story before everyone else does.