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, manual add and CSV import all 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 any of them. A used keyword cannot be put back into rotation until it is archived. 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 (at the start of the following calendar 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. An archived keyword never left your account, so picking it again uses no keyword quota. Deleting an archived keyword also lets discovery suggest it again, as a new keyword.

Monthly cycle

• At the start of every calendar month (00:05 UTC on the first day), every used keyword moves to archived and drops out of the default view. Archived keywords can be accepted again.
• Quota counters follow your plan's own cycle, not the calendar: monthly subscriptions reset on each renewal payment, annual subscriptions every month on the day of the month they started, lifetime tiers every month on the anniversary of the license activation. Free allowances never reset. See Plans and quotas.
• The keyword library itself doesn't reset. Keywords persist until you delete them, and a keyword already in your account (same text and language, on any of your sites) never uses quota again. Deleting a keyword removes it from your account: if it comes back later, through discovery or by hand, it counts as new.

Each plan includes a fixed number of discovery runs per cycle (one run in total on Free, monthly on Solo and Starter, twice a month on Growth, weekly on Agency and Business; lifetime tiers 1 and 2 monthly, tier 3 twice a month, tier 4 weekly), each capped by Max keywords this run (5 to 60, with a default set from the articles you have left) 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 keywords new to your account count against the quota. A run counts only when it adds at least one keyword.

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). For an occasional busy month, extra keywords at $0.09 each cover the gap without changing plan. Upgrade is 30 seconds away.