Brand Voice Governance

Check whether content conforms to a brand's own stated voice, block by block, and leave an audit trail.

This is the enforcement layer over brand-product-context. That skill captures the voice — the defining adjectives, the do/don't list, the words to avoid, the reading level. This skill holds content to it. The two are a pair: one writes the rule, the other checks against it.

The distinction this skill exists to enforce is conformance versus quality. aaj-copywriting's scorer asks whether copy is clear, concrete, and defensible — a judgment that's the same for every brand. This asks a different, brand-specific question: does this sound like this brand? The same sentence passes for a playful brand and fails for a clinical one. A general quality score cannot answer that, because it has no opinion about which voice is correct — only the brand's own brief does.

The problem it exists to solve is scale. One marketer writing one page holds the voice in their head. Ten people and an AI assistant producing forty pages a week do not. Ahrefs' detector found AI-generated text in 74% of 900,000 new English-language pages published in April 2025, mostly mixed with human writing (Ahrefs, May 2025; detectors are imperfect, so read it as a scale, not a precise count). AI writes to a generic professional register that drifts toward exactly the words most brands ban. Governance by eyeball doesn't survive that volume; a check that quotes every violation with its location does, and its log of what was flagged and why is the record you want when someone asks how AI-assisted copy was reviewed.

When to use

The user is reviewing content for brand conformance, setting up a guardrail before AI-generated copy ships, or auditing a body of existing content for drift. For whether copy is good — clarity, claim-defensibility — use aaj-copywriting. For whether the voice rules themselves are right, use brand-product-context to define them first.

Before you start

1. Get the voice rules. Read .agents/product-marketing.md — the Voice & tone section has the do/don't and words-to-avoid. If no brief exists, run brand-product-context first, or supply an explicit avoid-list, prefer-list, and grade ceiling. Without real brand rules the check falls back to AAJ house defaults, which catch generic jargon but aren't this brand.
2. Get the content as blocks. Paragraphs, list items, headings — the units an editor actually fixes. The engine splits on blank lines and list markers.
3. Confirm the reading-grade ceiling. The engine defaults to a grade-10 ceiling, AAJ's working default for B2B copy rather than a published standard. A brand writing for a technical audience may set it higher; say so, or the grade note will fire on legitimately dense copy.