content-gate is an Agent Skill for a people-first, Google Search Central–aligned pre-publish gate on blog and guide articles. It favors quality over page count and refuses search-engine-first shortcuts.

• Loads the project's own writing rules first (CONTENT_GUIDELINES.md, guidelines.md, or similar) and treats them as a hard gate.
• Asks who is helped and what task they can finish before keywords.
• Runs Who / How / Why, spam and scaled-content hard stops, and a pre-publish checklist for helpfulness, trust, craft, and localization.
• Reviews agent-written copy with the same bar as human drafts.
• Produces a pass / conditional / fail verdict with a fix plan when needed.

It is generic: use it on blogs and guides for any site. It does not assume a product brand.

Use assets/templates/gate_report.md for the write-up. Record:

• pass, conditional, or fail
• the one-sentence Why
• Who / How / Why, hard stops, and the pre-publish checklist
• a fix plan when the verdict is conditional

Put that checklist in the PR or review notes. Titles and metadata alone do not pass the gate.

Install from GitHub with the Skills CLI:

npx skills add vikingmute/content-gate

Or use the full GitHub URL:

npx skills add https://github.com/vikingmute/content-gate

Install globally for a specific agent:

npx skills add vikingmute/content-gate -g -a codex

Install globally for multiple agents:

npx skills add vikingmute/content-gate -g -a codex -a cursor -a opencode

Update an installed copy:

npx skills update content-gate

Update only global installs:

npx skills update content-gate -g

For local development without publishing, clone it into the cross-client Agent Skills directory:

git clone https://github.com/vikingmute/content-gate.git ~/.agents/skills/content-gate

For a project-local install, copy or clone it into the project:

mkdir -p .agents/skills
git clone https://github.com/vikingmute/content-gate.git .agents/skills/content-gate

Some clients also support their own native skill locations. For Codex, this is also valid:

cp -R content-gate ~/.codex/skills/content-gate

Then invoke it from a compatible agent with:

Use $content-gate to run the people-first publish checklist on this article.

If a client does not support explicit $skill syntax, ask it to use the content-gate skill or select it from the client's skills UI.

Use $content-gate to run the people-first publish checklist on this article.

Use $content-gate before I ship this guide.

Use $content-gate to review this draft against our CONTENT_GUIDELINES.md.

Use $content-gate on this localization of the getting-started article.

Use $content-gate to check this agent-written blog post before merge.

Content Gate follows public Google Search Central guidance. It is not a black-hat SEO playbook and does not cover keyword-volume or backlink tactics.

• Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content
• Guidance on generative AI content
• Spam policies for Google web search
• Google Search Essentials