Docs / Publishing & integrations / Publish destinations

Create a publish destination

A publish destination is where Content Studio sends finished articles. Before anything can be published, the workspace needs at least one — the endpoint, the signing secret, and optionally the IndexNow details. This guide shows you how to create and manage them.

1 · What a publish destination is

Content Studio is deliberately destination-generic: the same article is delivered through one canonical, versioned payload (PublishPayload) to whichever destination you choose. That is why one "webhook" type covers your blog, your CMS, a headless backend, or an automation tool — they all receive the same signed JSON.

2 · Where destinations are managed

Destinations live on their own page, Publish destinations — reached from your account menu (top right), or from the link under the destination selector in the Content Studio publish step. Configuring a target is configuration, not authoring, so it sits with Connected data (also in the account menu) rather than inside the writing surface.

3 · Create a destination

4 · Endpoint requirements

• The URL must be absolute and use http or https — a bare hostname like api.example.com/hook is rejected before saving.
• It must resolve to a public host. AEO Spotlight SSRF-guards every delivery and refuses private, loopback, link-local and CGNAT addresses, so it can never be used to probe your internal network.
• For local development, expose your receiver with a tunnel (ngrok, cloudflared) and use the tunnel's public URL as the endpoint.
• Use HTTPS. A secret-signed payload over plain HTTP is a credential leak.
• One destination per site/CMS. Agencies running client sites typically create one destination per client, named after the client.

5 · The signing secret

Every delivery is signed with an HMAC-SHA256 over the raw request body, sent in the X-AeoSpotlight-Signature: sha256=… header. Your receiver recomputes it and compares in constant time. The secret is the only thing standing between your endpoint and forged content, so it is treated as a credential.

• Write-only. After saving, the value is never shown again — not in the list, not in the edit form, not in any API response. All you can see is whether one is set.
• Blank on edit means “keep”. Editing a destination leaves the secret field empty; leaving it empty preserves the stored secret rather than clearing it.
• It must match your receiver exactly. A mismatch is the single most common integration failure and surfaces as 401 Invalid signature.
• Blank on create means unsigned. If you genuinely don't want signing, leaving it empty sends unsigned requests — and your receiver should then reject them.
• You cannot recover it. If it is lost, set a new value on both sides (destination and receiver) together.

Generate a strong one:

openssl rand -hex 32

6 · IndexNow (optional)

With an IndexNow host and key set, the platform pings IndexNow right after a successful publish so Bing, Yandex, Seznam, Naver and other participating engines crawl the new URL immediately. Nothing else about publishing changes.

• The key file must be hosted at the absolute root of the exact host you ping — https://www.example.com/your-key.txt — returning the key as plain text.
• The host must match where the file is served. If you ping www.example.com, host the file there; if you ping the apex, host it there. Pick one and be consistent.
• An IndexNow key is per-host. A key that works for one domain does not authenticate another — generate a separate key per host.
• If IndexNow is unconfigured, publishing still succeeds; the publish panel simply reports “IndexNow not configured”.

Full walkthrough: Set up IndexNow.

7 · What happens at publish time

1. In the Content Studio publish step you pick the destination from a dropdown of active destinations (plus an optional author/byline for that delivery).
2. Publishing delivers the article synchronously, single-attempt, with a 30-second timeout.
3. A 2xx response succeeds: the live URL is recorded on the opportunity, IndexNow is pinged (if configured), and the piece moves to published — after which AI citation monitoring is what closes the loop.
4. A non-2xx or timeout fails the publish and states the reason. Nothing is marked published, and there is no automatic retry — fix your receiver and publish again. Keep the receiver idempotent by slug so a retry cannot duplicate a page.
5. Re-publishing an unchanged live article is deliberately blocked; a live page is changed through Refresh (then Publish update) or a variant at its own URL instead.

Receiver-side contract: Receive content via webhook.

8 · Editing, disabling and deleting

• Edit — change the name, endpoint, or IndexNow details. The secret stays put unless you type a new one.
• Disable — keeps the record (and its secret) but removes it from the publish dropdown. Prefer this over deleting when the endpoint is temporarily down.
• Delete — permanent, and confirmed first. Articles already delivered through it are unaffected, but the stored secret cannot be read back, so re-adding the destination means re-entering the secret on both sides.

9 · Troubleshooting