Guides: How to Use Wire

Practical guides for getting Wire running and using it effectively. Start with setup, learn the workflow, then customize for your site. Each guide is self-contained. Read the one that matches your situation.

These guides assume you have read the capabilities overview and understand what Wire does. If you have not, start there. The guides explain how to use Wire. The capabilities explain why each feature exists and what evidence supports it.

Getting Started

Getting started walks you through installation, API key configuration, and running your first audit. You can be up and running in under 10 minutes. Covers Python setup, API key configuration, optional search console credentials, and your first wire.chief audit command. By the end of setup, you will have a complete SEO audit of your site at zero cost. The same analysis that agencies charge $2,000-$15,000 per month to produce.

Daily Operations

The daily workflow explains the recommended command sequence. Each step feeds the next. Running them out of order wastes API calls or produces suboptimal results. The guide includes a weekly schedule and cost tracking per command.

Wire's batch commands follow a fixed sequence: data, audit, deduplicate, news, refine, reword, enrich, crosslink, sanitize, build. The audit step is free (zero API calls). Content generation commands use minimal AI tokens per operation, covered by your AI subscription. A full weekly cycle for a 500-page site uses far less than what a single freelance article would cost, including news gathering, content enrichment, and a market intelligence report. See pricing.

Configuration

The configuration reference covers every wire.yml setting, environment variable, and prompt override. This includes CSS theming through custom properties, frontmatter-driven metadata, and per-topic tuning for news freshness intervals and reword tier percentages. Wire reads all configuration from wire.yml. No dashboard, no web interface, no accounts. Configuration is code, versioned in git, reproducible across machines.

Content Control

Prompt engineering shows you how to control what the AI sees at every level, from site-wide editorial rules down to topic-specific instructions. The three-layer prompt system (styleguide, topic prompt, fallback) means you can customize output without touching Wire's code. The patterns encode findings from the LfM-Band 60 study (verification = 7.9% of journalism research time), the Zyppy title study (61.6% title rewrite rate), and the 2024 Google API leak (NavBoost, titleMatchScore, entity extraction).

The writing quality guide explains how prompt order, source verification rules, and good versus bad examples produce journalism-grade content, backed by empirical research from the LfM-Band 60 study (235 journalists observed) and the netzwerk recherche training handbook. The SEO reference documents every audit check with the independent research evidence behind each threshold. Not Google's public statements, but leak-confirmed signals, A/B tests, and correlation studies.

SEO Deep Dives

The Google API leak analysis explains what the 2024 leak revealed about ranking signals Google publicly denied: NavBoost click data, site authority, Chrome browsing data, and entity extraction. Every Wire feature maps to a leak-confirmed signal. The title rewriting guide covers why Google rewrites 61-76% of title tags and how Wire prevents every known trigger automatically. Together, these guides document the evidence base that separates Wire from tools that rely on Google's public statements, statements the leak proved are systematically misleading.

The pricing comparison breaks down what Wire costs versus manual SEO and agency retainers: your AI subscription versus $150-$300, a massive gap driven by local math replacing human labor.

Quality Assurance

The visual QA guide explains Wire's screenshot testing and layout regression detection system. Wire uses Playwright to capture full-page screenshots at desktop (1280x900) and mobile (390x844) viewports, compares them against reference baselines, and flags regressions when more than 2% of pixels differ. The QA report is a self-contained HTML file with embedded screenshots and color-coded pass/fail results. QA runs automatically on every build, catching layout regressions before deploy, preventing CLS damage that Google's Page Experience signals would penalize.

Migration and Extensions

Adding a site explains how to point Wire at a new content directory. WordPress migration converts existing WordPress pages to Wire-compatible markdown with preserved metadata, images, and SEO signals. The discovery system adds interactive guided reading layers to long-form content, increasing dwell time, a signal the Google API leak confirmed feeds directly into NavBoost rankings through the lastLongestClicks feature.

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