Audience Specification

Why audience changes the analysis

ContentGrapher derives the explanation framework — the required concept structure — from your topic and your audience together. The same topic analyzed for a beginner requires different concepts, at different depths, than the same topic analyzed for an expert.

A guide to Kubernetes networking analyzed for a DevOps engineer needs different prerequisite concepts, different depth on routing internals, and different failure mode coverage than the same guide analyzed for a developer who has never touched Kubernetes.

What happens without an audience specification

If you leave the audience fields blank, the defaults (general reader, intermediate level) are passed to Phase 2. The analysis is valid, but the writing guidance will not be calibrated to the specific reader you are actually writing for.

When the fields are left blank, Phase 2 also draws on the audience ContentGrapher inferred from the page content in Phase 1. For targeted revisions, always fill in the fields — an inferred audience is a fallback, not a specification.

How to specify audience effectively

The audience input has three fields.

Role is a text field describing who the reader is. Several common roles appear as quick-select options — selecting one fills the field, which you can then edit. Avoid vague roles like "a professional"; they do not add calibration information.

Knowledge level is a dropdown: Beginner, Intermediate (default), or Expert. This controls the assumed baseline. At Expert, foundational concepts are deprioritized. At Beginner, fundamentals become required. Be accurate — setting Expert when the real audience is Intermediate will produce a gap list that omits concepts your readers actually need.

Task is a text field for what the reader wants to accomplish. "Evaluate whether to use this tool" versus "implement this in production" produces different writing guidance even for the same topic and role.

When to enter your audience

Phase 1 runs automatically when you submit a URL — it produces the concept graph and boundary classifications. The audience fields appear before Phase 2 launches. Fill them in at that point, then trigger Phase 2.

Once Phase 2 has run for an analysis, the audience cannot be changed for that result. To see the analysis under a different audience, re-analyze the same URL with updated audience fields.

Phase 2 requires an analysis credit. The audience specification you enter determines the explanation framework for that credit, so it is worth filling in carefully before triggering Phase 2.

Changing audience between analyses

You can change the audience specification between re-analyses. This is useful when you are writing for multiple audiences and want to understand what each needs from the same page.

Changing the audience changes the explanation framework, which will affect the coverage score and gap list even if the content is unchanged — because the required concept set changed. For a meaningful content delta, compare runs with the same audience specification. Use different-audience runs to understand what different readers need, not to measure whether your writing improved.