Monthly keyword cycle

A keyword in the library is always in one of five states. Understanding them keeps your library clean.

Why "used" is sticky

Two reasons:

1. You don't want to write the same article twice (Google will deduplicate or penalize).
2. Discovery is a precious budget; re-suggesting yesterday's queries wastes it.

Discovery and manual add both check the library for that site and language before inserting, and used and archived rows stay in that check, so the phrase cannot come back through either door. A used keyword cannot be put back into rotation during its cycle. If the article generated from it failed, use Retry generation on the article instead: it resumes the pipeline from the stage that stopped and never touches the keyword.

Once the keyword is archived (from the 1st of the following month) the choice is yours again: show archived keywords, tick the ones you want and accept them. They go back to accepted and the next Plan this month can pick them, so you can write a new article on a phrase you covered before. Deleting an archived keyword also lets discovery suggest it again.

Monthly cycle

• On the 1st of every month at 00:05 UTC, every used keyword moves to archived and drops out of the default view. Archived keywords can be accepted again.
• The same job resets the monthly article and keyword counters of lifetime organizations and of annual subscribers. Monthly subscribers are reset when Stripe confirms each renewal payment instead, so nobody gets two quotas in one month. Free accounts are excluded: their quotas are lifetime totals and never reset.
• The keyword library itself doesn't reset. Keywords persist until you delete them.

Each plan includes a fixed number of discovery runs per cycle (monthly on Free, Solo and Starter, twice a month on Growth, weekly on Agency and Business; see Plans and quotas), each capped by Max keywords this run (5 to 60, default 30) and by the keywords left in your quota. A rate limit of 5 runs every 5 minutes protects the service on plans with weekly runs. Each run produces fresh rows; deduplication keeps duplicates out, and only rows actually inserted count against the quota.

Are you running out of discovery?

Your 150 keyword/month budget on Starter is exactly enough for 30 articles. If you're consistently rejecting more than half, you're researching at Growth velocity (375 keywords/month). Upgrade is 30 seconds away.