What does "essential" vs "important" vs "useful" mean?

Essential

Essential concepts are those the pipeline judges as load-bearing for the stated reader. If an essential concept is missing or underexplained, the core argument does not hold for that audience. Missing essential concepts are the first thing to fix. Start with the toAdd and toClarify items for essential concepts before moving to the rest of the writing brief.

Phase 2, which produces the priority assignments and writing brief, requires an analysis credit.

Important

Important concepts significantly strengthen the analysis for the reader but do not break comprehension if absent. A concept that is present on the page but weakly integrated often lands here: it exists, but its explanation is not yet doing the work required. toClarify items for important concepts typically require expanding what is already there.

Useful

Useful concepts add supporting context, examples, or depth. A first-time reader can follow the core argument without them. A sophisticated or returning reader may notice their absence.

Useful does not mean optional. For expert audiences, a concept that lands at useful on the current priority distribution can become essential if the audience input changes. The tier reflects a judgment about what this reader needs right now, not an absolute classification of the concept.

How priorities are assigned

Priority assignments are the pipeline's judgment, calibrated to the audience input you provide, evaluated per concept given the full explanation framework. There is no formula or scoring threshold. The pipeline evaluates each concept's role in a coherent explanation for the stated reader.

This is a product assumption built into how ContentGrapher frames the analysis, not an empirically verified property of how LLMs behave in general. The same concept can land at different priority tiers for different readers of the same page.

Priorities change with audience

Changing the audience survey input changes the priority distribution. The concept list stays the same; the priority tiers reflect the reader you described. If you want to understand what different audiences need from the same page, re-run Phase 2 with different audience inputs and compare the priority distributions. Re-running Phase 2 uses one analysis credit.

See the guide on why priorities differ by audience for a concrete example of the same concept moving between tiers.