New batch Step 2: brand, content & SEO advanced options

Everything you set in Step 2 (“Advanced options”) applies to every site in the batch. Most fields are optional — leave them blank for the default or an AI-inferred value; fields marked with a red “*” are required. The page is organized into three sub-steps: Brand · AI · Language, SEO · Analytics · Contact · Company, and Differentiation · Data.

Tip

Short on time? Pick your Industry first, then click the “Recommend by industry” button: it fills tone / CTA / primary color / font / style with sensible presets and enables the recommended SEO switches (site entity, auto OG image, IndexNow, breadcrumb, and more). You can undo it for a short while after applying.

Required fields

If required fields are still empty when you click “Next”, a banner shows “N required field(s) still missing: …” with a “jump to first missing” shortcut. The required set includes:

• Group name (1–10 characters, used to filter sites later)
• Site type, Industry, Region, Primary language, Tone, Primary CTA goal
• Logo handling, robots.txt preset, Image replacement (Replace / Keep template images)

These fields directly drive AI output quality — choose deliberately rather than clicking through.

Brand

Brand context

Field	What it does
Site type	Sets the content positioning and narrows the industry list (corporate, blog, e-commerce, …)
Industry	Biases AI writing — jargon, pain points; also feeds the one-click recommend presets
Region	Affects copy voice, currency and contact examples; “Mainland China” reveals ICP / WeChat / Baidu fields
Tone	Writing voice (professional, casual, authoritative, warm, …) with a one-line description per option
Primary CTA goal	Conversion goal (lead capture, sign up, purchase, engagement, …) steering buttons and calls to action

Brand visuals

• Logo handling: keep the template logo / text logo (renders the brand name you entered) / keyword logo (each site renders one random keyword).
• Brand primary color / accent color: drives button, link and heading colors; pick a preset or enter a 6-char hex such as #1e73be. Leave the accent blank to derive it from the primary.
• Font preference / visual style: defaults follow the template; visual style mainly nudges the AI rewrite voice (luxury → formal, playful → energetic). It does not touch the template’s CSS, layout or palette — the two settings below are what actually change how a site looks.

Color variation across the batch / per-site CSS re-skin

When you build a batch from one template, the loudest linking footprint is that all the sites look identical. These two settings fix it, from light to thorough:

• Color variation across the batch: defaults to “Subtle (±15°)”, with “Off (identical)” and “Strong (±30°)” as the alternatives. Each site derives a slightly shifted hue from the primary color you picked, seeded per site (different across the batch, reproducible). It only affects the brand colors GOCO injects (buttons, links, accents) — the template’s own CSS is untouched.
• Per-site CSS re-skin: off by default. When on, GOCO rewrites the template’s own .css files and inline <style> blocks, rotating the hue of the saturated theme colors; greys, body text and backgrounds are left alone so readability is preserved. Because it edits the real color values it works on any template, so sites built from the same source stop looking alike. Two modes:
  • A brand primary color is set: the template’s dominant theme hue is aligned to your brand color (then nudged per site by the color-variation amount) — one color re-skins the whole template instead of clashing with the injected primary.
  • No primary color: a per-site seeded hue rotation whose magnitude follows the color variation (Subtle ±15° / Strong ±30°).

Caution

With no primary color and color variation set to Off, the rotation angle is 0 and the per-site CSS re-skin is a no-op. Either set a brand primary color, or keep color variation at “Subtle” or above. The re-skin is applied file by file and skips a file it can’t parse (it never fails a build), but it genuinely changes the template’s look — build 1–2 sites first and check before scaling up.

Note

Both settings are different from “visual style”, and neither applies to the GOCO v2 engine (v2 re-skins through its own design tokens) — pick v2 in Step 1 and these rows are greyed out with a “not used by v2” note.

Company info & contacts (differentiated per site)

Company name defaults to “Generate from brand” (brand + “Inc.”-style); Slogan defaults to random generation; Business hours offers presets, custom text, or hide; Social links can be pasted manually or generated per site for the platforms you tick.

Each contact field (customer service phone / email / WeChat ID / WhatsApp / physical address) has its own source mode:

• Manual: enter your real details; they replace the template’s placeholder phone / email.
• Random (default): generated at deploy time from region / site domain — e.g. email defaults to “random prefix + site domain” (info@yourdomain).
• Skip: nothing is emitted for that field and the template placeholder is cleaned out.

Two companion switches:

• Brand differentiation: on by default (“pick from keywords”). When a site’s brand collides with another site in the batch or one you already own, it automatically gets a differentiated brand (display name, social handles, company name). The first occurrence is left as-is.
• Per-site differentiation: off by default. When on, manually entered phone / email / address get a small per-site variation so sites don’t share identical contacts; leave it off for a single real business.

Content generation

• AI model: defaults to “Platform (GOCO built-in AI)”, platform-billed; or switch to your own OpenAI / Anthropic / OpenAI-compatible endpoint key (add it under Account → API keys first; you pay the provider). The AI writes original copy from your industry, tone and region — it never copies a source.
• Seed document: paste a brand brief, product spec or FAQ (up to 4,000 characters); the AI extracts facts from it instead of inventing. Strongly recommended for real businesses.
• Article count: the “Article count override” sets how many articles each site gets in its first build (1–50); blank keeps the template / theme default. You can also enable “Generate long-tail keyword tag pages”: ~30 extra long-tail pages per site to widen indexable coverage (off by default).
• Languages: Primary language is required and drives the AI output language plus the page lang tag. Secondary languages each deploy into their own sub-path (such as /en/) — cost doubles per added language. Sub-path names default to the language code and can be customized (a–z, 0–9, -, _ only, max 20 characters).

SEO options

TDK and titles

Each site’s title / description / keywords (TDK) come from the per-row values you entered in the Step 1 site list; Step 2 sets the batch-level policy:

• Homepage title pattern: “As entered” / “Title - Brand” / “Brand | Title” / “Randomized per site” / “AI-optimized title” (AI rewrites a more SEO-friendly homepage title from each site’s own TDK + industry + region, one site at a time). Default: “As entered”.
• Complete SEO tags: on by default. Auto-fills common tags the template lacks (viewport, og:site_name, …) and never overrides tags the template already ships.

Keywords tag switch

“Output meta keywords (per-site differentiated)” is off by default: major search engines ignore the tag, and shipping the same keyword string across a whole batch is a linking footprint — so the system strips the template’s placeholder keywords and injects nothing. If a delivery checklist requires the tag, turn it on: it is built from each site’s own keywords (the Step 1 keywords column), picking up to 8 per page in shuffled order. The switch only affects sites built after you enable it — already-built sites need a rebuild.

robots.txt and AI search

• robots.txt preset (required): Open (default, best for indexing) / Moderate / Conservative / Fully open / Custom. With “Custom”, a live preview shows the exact robots.txt to be written, and risky rules are flagged (for example “Disallow: /” blocks the whole site).
• AI search visibility: defaults to “Allow AI crawlers” — good for being cited in ChatGPT / Perplexity and other AI search (GEO); “Block” adds Disallow rules to robots.txt.
• IndexNow: on by default — pushes the homepage to Bing / Yandex after build to speed up indexing.
• llms.txt (AI search): on by default (badged “recommended”). Writes llms.txt (site summary + page list) and llms-full.txt (which also carries each page’s body text) to the site root — think “a sitemap written for AI”. Both are built from the same URL set as sitemap.xml, so the two listings can never disagree. Caveat: this is an emerging community convention, and Google stated (July 2025) that no AI system currently reads it — it carries no ranking signal. Harmless and forward-looking; turn it off if you’d rather not ship the two extra files. Supported by both the HTML engine and the GOCO v2 engine.

Trailing slash

“Use trailing slashes (/page/)” is off by default. When on, GOCO converts every non-homepage X.html into X/index.html and rewrites all internal links, canonical, og:url, structured data and the sitemap to match, so the pretty /page/ URL actually resolves.

• Upside: one URL shape site-wide — no /page vs /page/ duplicate-content split.
• Downside: every URL changes shape (X.html → X/). Don’t turn it on for a site that is already indexed or whose links are already out there — the old URLs stop working. Decide before you build.
• Exceptions: error documents (404 / 403 / 50x / error / offline / maintenance / coming-soon) and the /keywords/ long-tail directory are never restructured — they must stay at their literal path for the web server to serve them — and GOCO does not emit pretty canonicals for those pages either.
• The GOCO v2 engine has its own fixed URL rules, so this row is greyed out when v2 is selected.

Structured data and share images

• Homepage site entity (Organization + WebSite structured data): on by default; helps search engines identify the brand.
• Inner-page breadcrumb: defaults to “structured data”; can be “visible + structured data” or off.
• Auto OG image: on by default — composes a 1200×630 share image from your brand color + title.
• GEO options (FAQ, author byline / E-E-A-T, trust pages, answer-form content): off by default; enable them when you want AI-search citations and “real business” signals.

Webmaster + analytics

You can enter a GA4 measurement ID, Baidu Tongji ID, Microsoft Clarity ID, and site verification codes for Google / Baidu / Bing / Yandex — injected into every page at build time.

Caution

A batch-level analytics ID is applied to every site as-is — one tracking ID across many sites is a classic linking footprint. For per-site IDs, append the GA4 / Baidu ID columns when pasting the site list in Step 1.

Defaults at a glance

Setting	Default	Suggestion
Homepage title pattern	As-is	For many sites, use “random per site” or the AI-optimized title
Keywords tag	Off	Enable only when a delivery checklist requires it
robots.txt preset	Open	Keep “Open” for new sites
AI search visibility	Allow	Keep “Allow” if you want AI-search exposure
llms.txt (AI search)	On	Keep it on — harmless, forward-looking
Trailing slash	Off	Only when you really want pretty URLs, and only before the first build
Color variation across the batch	Subtle (±15°)	Keep it for matrices; “Off” for a single real business
Per-site CSS re-skin	Off	Turn it on for batches from one template (test 1–2 sites first)
Auto OG image / Complete SEO tags / Site entity / IndexNow	On	Keep on
Brand differentiation	Pick from keywords	Use “Pinyin suffix” if you don’t want the brand replaced
Contact source	Random	Switch to “Manual” for a real business
Company name	Generate from brand	Enter it manually if you have a registered entity

When to change the defaults

• Single real business: set all contacts to “Manual”, turn off per-site differentiation, fill in the seed document and the real company name; you can also set color variation to “Off” so the site sticks strictly to your brand color.
• Targeting mainland China: pick the “Mainland China” region (or flip the target switch), add the ICP filing number and Baidu analytics / verification codes.
• Multi-site matrix: use one-click recommend, keep brand differentiation and random contacts, set the title pattern to “random per site”, and turn on the per-site CSS re-skin so the sites don’t look alike.
• Multi-language markets: add secondary languages and confirm the sub-path names; remember cost doubles per language.

Common messages and how to fix them

• “N required field(s) still missing: …” — click “jump to first missing” and complete the fields marked with a red “*”.
• “The following fields are invalid — fix them to continue” — an optional field has a bad format (color, analytics ID, URL); left unfixed, the whole advanced group is dropped.
• Sub-path name rejected — only a–z, 0–9, hyphen and underscore are allowed, and reserved site directories (posts / topics / lp / assets / keywords) can’t be used.
• “This server’s license doesn’t include the GOCO built-in AI model” — buy the AI add-on, or switch the AI model to your own API key.

Back to the tutorial overviewThe two build paths and the common three-step flow