Frequently Asked Questions

Acrolinx is an AI-powered content governance platform designed for the entire enterprise. Acrolinx is used by a wide range of organizations and industries that want to improve the quality, readability, accuracy, and relevance of their written content. More importantly, Acrolinx makes sure you’re achieving your desired business results, fueled by content. Teams that use Acrolinx are typically:

Marketing and communications: These teams create and publish content for various marketing channels and campaigns. They use Acrolinx to make sure their web copy, brochures, social media posts, email marketing, blog posts, and case studies are engaging and effective, while meeting brand and style guidelines

Technical documentation teams: Includes users who aren’t professional writers, may have a developer background but create manuals, product descriptions, release notes, spec sheets, and other technical content. They use Acrolinx to make sure their content is clear, easy to understand, uses consistent terminology, and meets industry standards. 

Localization specialists: Are responsible for adapting content to a global audience. Localization teams use Acrolinx to speed up the translation and localization process, with few translator queries thanks to better quality source text. 

Quality assurance teams: Sometimes called “governance councils” who are responsible for making sure content meets the standards set by the organization. They use Acrolinx to automate manual compliance checks, and identify gaps in the content that might leave the organization exposed to legal risk. 

Support teams: Create content designed to help users achieve their goals and problem solve issues independently. They use Acrolinx to deliver an optimal customer experience by making sure the voice and tone is aligned to the target audience, and that content is improved for readability and self-service.

Acrolinx doesn’t write the content for you. But it does check whether the content you write is aligned with your bespoke corporate guidelines and business goals.

We live in a world where anyone can be a content creator. And thanks to AI-generated content, you don’t need to be a professional writer to string a decent sentence together! At Acrolinx, we celebrate technological developments around natural language processing. But we also see the limitations in AI writing tools. Here’s why:

– For content to be compelling, it needs to appeal to the emotions of your audience. Relying on AI-generated content means that content might lack the emotional appeal and connection that human writers can generate. Not to mention, emotional appeal might not matter as much for different types of content;for example, it’s great in marketing copy, but less relevant in product descriptions or technical specs.

– AI-models don’t always fully understand the context. And when it comes to your business, only you know that best. Your brand style, tone, terminology, and voice have been carefully developed to have nuances in language that make your content a competitive differentiator. Which is why we leave content creation up to you. –

– Content created by generative AI is only as good as the data it was tuned on. When there are approximately 2 billion websites in the world, creating strategy-aligned content has never mattered more! Many of our customers use Acrolinx to deal with huge volumes of content, and much of it includes legacy content that’s quickly outdated, of poor quality, not inclusive, or simply not findable. Acrolinx can check entire websites and content libraries and show you where the gaps are: gaps you wouldn’t want to tune a generative AI model to replicate.

Content quality can be a vague term. It means different things to different organizations and content owners. Content quality means that content is free of mistakes, grammatically correct, and perhaps even tells a good story or delivers something truly useful to your target audience. 

At Acrolinx, we talk about content alignment instead of content quality. Content alignment is key to content that performs well. Because every piece of content is (ideally) created with a purpose, one that aligns to your business goals. 
Content impact considers how every piece of content works together, to create a unified brand experience that differentiates your content from generically “good” content. Which is why we measure content alignment as a mixture of industry standards and those that are unique to your business. And import your custom brand style, tone, voice, and terminology into Acrolinx, to keep every piece of content aligned to whatever you define as amazing content.

While a free spell checker does the bare minimum at keeping your content readable, it’s a long way from helping you align your content to your bespoke style guidelines, or keep your voice, tone, style, and terminology consistent across all your channels. 
Acrolinx understands that the entire customer experience is powered by content, and that a great customer experience relies on more than great spelling and grammar. It gives you a more comprehensive and integrated approach to content quality and effectiveness. 

In fact, Acrolinx combines content quality metrics and content performance metrics in one place, to allow you to understand which parts of your content to adjust to improve certain content goals. And, Acrolinx integrates seamlessly wherever you write content best, whether that be UX/UI strings, WordPress, Confluence, or Salesforce. 

We don’t have a trial. That’s because unlike a generic grammar checker, we import your organization’s unique content guidelines that are aligned with your content strategy. If you use company-specific terminology (e.g product names), we like to integrate your terminology with Acrolinx so that if someone spells your company name wrong, Acrolinx will alert them to it.

What we can do is show you an explainer video of how Acrolinx works, and you can schedule a demo with one of our content experts. They’ll work with you to demonstrate how Acrolinx works with your specific content and goals.

Acrolinx supports 6 different languages, including many types of English (US, UK, CA, Oxford, ASD-STE100). Most content goals are available in each language, although not all. Content goals include correctness, clarity, consistency, tone, scannability, words and phrases, and inclusive language. See this table for more detail on which content goals are supported for each language.

Our integrations cover most places where you create content. Whether that’s DITA content, code, Word docs or Powerpoint slides. We aspire to be everywhere you write, seamlessly. Which is why we have an impressive set of more than 50+ authoring environments, and the option to build your own integration with our API if you need even more versatility. See all our current integrations via this link.

Once you’ve had a proper introduction to your onboarding team, you can start using Acrolinx right away. In fact, we encourage it! Then, with three easy admin lessons, you’re on your way to getting your users up and running with Acrolinx.

The great thing about Acrolinx is how flexible it is. Use our presets or change guideline configurations based on your content. For example, you could choose to follow specific industry standards for content, but still have the flexibility to customize individual guidelines to suit your unique corporate standards. with the exception of one specific guideline, simply by unchecking a box. 

Of course, we’re here to help you get the most out of Acrolinx to meet your content goals. Which is why our consultants are always available to help you review your current corporate style guide, set content goals that best align to your business goals, and test and tweak your content guidelines accordingly.

An AI Authoring Assistant is useful for content creators in that it helps you write better content. It does that by checking your content against style guides, brand guidelines, and industry standards,while giving you feedback to improve your content. It does that by giving you readability scores, tone of voice guidance, inclusive language suggestions, and tips to make your content more scannable and free of jargon. The goal is to make your content more effective, eliminate grammar and style issues, and speed up the editorial review process.

Inclusive language is language that does more than avoid being discriminatory. It’s intentional use of language that makes people from different backgrounds, with different identities, feel safe to be themselves, supported, seen, and encouraged. The Acrolinx Inclusive language solution groups our inclusive language guidelines into four categories. They are:

1. Respectful language
2. Gender neutral language
3. Person first language
4. Inclusive representation 

An example of the kind of feedback you’d receive with Acrolinx Inclusive Language checks would be:

– Historical context: Feedback on the history that certain words have.
– Intentional use: Referring to personal traits only when necessary.
– Accessible to all: Guidance on clear language that considers non-native English speakers. 
– Fair job descriptions: Gender neutral language that keeps the door open for all applicants. 

For more information about inclusive language, check out our inclusive language content hub, or product page

Acrolinx is a software that’s targeted towards large, Fortune 2000 enterprises that want content governance at scale. We don’t have a B2C product, and for solo writers looking to up their game, we’d prefer to recommend a solution like Grammarly for freelance content creators.

Automation allows you to introduce greater efficiency into every stage of your content journey. It can check content against your standards upon save, edit, push or pull requests, and prevents the publication of content below your predefined quality standards. By regularly scheduling checks of large content repositories, you can catch potentially outdated content and update it before it damages the customer experience. You can also easily identify content quality issues before they become a compliance issue. Think proactive remediation and continuous improvement, without manual effort to regularly audit your entire company content. 

With automation you’re able to make sure all your content is aligned to its audience and to corporate guidelines. This is the best way to benchmark performance to understand how well your tone of voice aligns with that audience. For example, if good scoring content doesn’t perform as well as lower scoring content, your style guide does not align with your intended audience.This would be a great time to pivot and update your style guide.

This is where Acrolinx thrives. Our largest customers are in industries such as global finance, healthcare, and pharmaceuticals. Within these industries, there’s required terminology, phrasing, and disclosures that must be used verbatim. Otherwise these enterprises may risk compliance issues and see hefty fines. Even more important is the proper phrasing of instructional content that when misread could cause injury and harm. 

Acrolinx will make sure your writers have access to and are using established corporate messaging. This reduces risk and increases compliance. Acrolinx will also continually govern and check all published content for any improper messaging. Additionally, when changes are made to important messaging, Acrolinx will find where the old messaging is published and prioritize it for correction.

Authoring Assistants should be considered essential as part of your content strategy and your content governance plan. But they’re restricted to the needs of the content creator, and don’t always give leadership a way to connect their business goals to their content. There are bigger content-related issues that span across the entire content lifecycle that you can’t address with authoring assistance. Automating workflows, terminology management, and performance analytics over the course of your content’s lifespan are also critical to achieving your goals with content. 

Authoring assistants are great at enabling the writer by giving them suggestions for improvement. But suggestions can be ignored, and if it can be ignored, it’s not proper content governance. If you’re not enforcing writers to accept the feedback of the authoring assistant, you then must use automation to make sure the content they write is on-brand, clear, compliant, and inclusive. This is the biggest reason why enterprises use automation and quality gating from Acrolinx. 

Acrolinx centralizes your content governance and streamlines your content operation. Our philosophy is that the best content strategies are digital, accessible to the whole enterprise, guide writers where they work, and offer metrics that help key stakeholders make better business decisions involving content.

Absolutely! Regardless of whether you have established, well-defined KPIs for measuring the effectiveness of your content, or you’d simply like that first-glimpse into today’s content quality – Acrolinx is for you! If you don’t know where to start, your Acrolinx purchase comes with consulting packages, with highly qualified linguists that can help you review where your content is today, and set measurable goals for the future. 

What’s more, you have a host of analytics dashboards included in your instance of Acrolinx, where you can see first-hand how your writers are complying with your organization’s brand.

Acrolinx customers are seeing powerful increases in impact from content governance, including IBM, Microsoft, HSBC, Humana, Siemens Healthineers, and more.
Here’s a sample of what our customers report seeing:

 – 90% reduction in published content errors
 – 25% increase in customer satisfaction
 – 5X increase in customer engagement
 – 2.4X increase in content creation velocity
 – 90% reduction in content review time

Interested in learning more about how Acrolinx delivers the business results you need to show the ROI of content. Download our brochure: “Enterprise Content: An Asset Worthy of Investment” or download this handy infographic.

AI content generation removes many roadblocks to publishing more content, faster. However, like all content sources – whether staff, agency, or AI – they still need to meet corporate quality standards, and be aligned to your business tone, voice, terminology, and style. If you’re creating more content, are you staffing your editors to review that extra content? More content doesn’t mean better content if all it does is create bigger editorial bottlenecks.

Acrolinx can assist in governing your content operation by automatically checking huge volumes of either human or AI-generated content and scoring it for how well it aligns to your company’s guidelines. From there, you can prioritize the content that most needs reviewing and maintain a consistent content experience across the entire customer journey.

Content governance software like Acrolinx captures and digitizes your company’s content standards. It then scores your existing content against those standards and uses authoring assistance to actively guide writers as they create new content. And once you’ve published that content, Acrolinx gives you analytics for both quality and performance.

Many AI writing tools create content without following proper corporate guidelines. Most of them will try to align the content they create to the style of the writer, and not the enterprise. AI writing tools are great for generating content ideas and fighting writer’s block. But they don’t give an  enterprise impactful content that’s aligned with its corporate style.