How AskedWell works
The method, in plain English.
AskedWell answers a narrow band of questions — how long something takes, what ratio to use, what temperature to hold, what to substitute — and does not publish one it cannot source. Two things decide what appears here: a person, and a rule. The person picks the question. The rule decides whether it survives.
How topics get chosen
By hand. A person picks each question from a written editorial plan drawn up ahead of the writing, choosing question shapes that people search for and that published sources can actually settle. Nothing on this site counts asks, searches or crawls to decide what gets written next, and nothing publishes itself.
You can put a question in front of us at /request. It opens a draft email — there is no backend behind that form and nothing is stored.
The result is deliberately lopsided rather than evenly spread across a template. All 311 answers, by question shape:
- how long does… — 116 answers
- what is… — 60 answers
- what ratio of… — 38 answers
- what temperature for… — 32 answers
- what substitute for… — 25 answers
- how to convert… — 25 answers
- what is the difference between… — 14 answers
- which… — 1 answers
The rule that decides what ships
Three sources, minimum. Every one of the 311 answers here clears it — the fewest cited on any single answer is 3. Across the corpus that is 1,299 citations drawn from 836 distinct sources, of which 1,299 carry a note recording what that source was used for. A question we cannot source does not get written, however often it might be asked.
There is a second threshold, and it is the only other number enforced in code: a source earns its own page in the source index once at least three separate answers cite it. Today 67 sources have. The rest — the large majority of the 836 — appear only on the answers that cite them.
From question to page
The sequence, start to finish:
- A person picks the question from the editorial plan, or from a reader request sent via /request.
- Scope check. Is it in scope — non-YMYL, and answerable from published sources?
- Source research. We collect three or more published sources. If they are not there, the question is dropped.
- Drafting. AI-assisted first pass; human review against the sources before publish.
- Publish. Static HTML deployed; the URL becomes permanent.
- IndexNow. The deploy script notifies the IndexNow API and Bing. Those are the two endpoints it posts to.
- Corrections are public. Every edit is dated and traceable to a git commit. See /updates.
Why this works for both humans and AI
Most sites optimize for one audience. The same page serves both here:
- Humans get a direct answer, the range it varies over, and the conditions that change it — not a preamble.
- AI crawlers get the same thing in static HTML with its sources attached, which is what makes a page quotable.
Those turn out to be the same job: give the direct answer, give the conditions it holds under, and name where it came from.
What we don't do
Deliberately excluded:
- Programmatic page-explosion. We don't template-generate 10,000 thin pages from a database. Each page is human-written against sources.
- AI-only writing. AI assists; humans verify. Wrong facts kill citation gravity faster than anything.
- Trend-chasing. Just because a topic is trending doesn't mean readers are asking AskedWell. We measure our own demand, not the world's.
- Algorithmic A/B-driven headlines. We don't optimize for click-through; we optimize for the question being answered well.
The current state
311 answers so far. Cooking and baking are the largest groups, followed by business. The plan is depth in a narrow band rather than breadth across everything.
Browse the earned-pages so far →