Legible coaching,
not opaque scoring.
A design exploration of a GEO optimisation product that presumes the writer is smart, and earns every number it shows. Five surfaces, one trust contract.
Most tools that score writing tell you what without telling you why. They produce a number, a grade, a traffic light - and leave the writer to infer the underlying model by trial and error. This works for compliance. It fails for craft.
Cerberus is designed for the writer who wants to argue with the machine. Every recommendation carries its cohort, its interval, its provenance. Every override becomes an event in a permanent log. The model is not a black box - it is a set of observations, each editable, each with visible weight.
The five surfaces below are the minimum case to prove this. They share one spine: confidence is always the first thing you see, and the last thing you can edit.
The rules the design refuses to break.
Confidence is a spine, not a decoration.
Every number, every recommendation, every observation declares its tier - high, medium, low - in the same place, the same way. The spine never moves, across all five surfaces.
"Why this?" is always one click away.
Cohort size, model version, base rate, interval, the specific examples that drove the inference - none of it is buried, none of it is inferred. The receipts are always shown, not assumed.
Disagreeing is a first-class verb.
Override isn't a rare admin action - it's how the product learns. The weight of every correction is visible before it's saved, and stays in the log forever after.
Champagne is a flourish, not a filler.
Colour is reserved for single moments - a threshold crossed, a scope highlighted, a correction weighted. Otherwise the surface is stone. The less we say, the more each word carries.
The minimum case.
The model's reckoning with its own predictions.
Most tools stop predicting once the user has applied the change. Cerberus holds itself to the prediction. When the model is wrong, the ledger says so. When a cohort is thin, the cohort says so. When a pattern is contested, it is downgraded visibly, on the next run.
A dashboard that starts with why you should trust it.
The visibility number is never alone. It carries its 90-day trend, its cohort, its prior month's delta - and always, always, its confidence interval. The dashboard assumes the reader will look, not glance.
Scoring that reads the prose, not the metadata.
Each scored passage is marked in the manuscript itself, anchored to the sentence it concerns. The score is a conversation between the writer and the model, not a verdict handed down from outside the text.
Two ways of hearing the same portrait.
The data is identical: seventeen observations about Rowan's voice, audience, goals, and how AI systems quote him. The treatments differ. Editorial is a magazine spread - chapters, rules, a running ticker. Portrait is a letter - second person, one column, narrative prose laced with the same numbers.
One card, many rooms, one shape.
A recommendation appears on the dashboard, inline in the editor, on the tracker, and in the weekly email digest. The affordances compress. The contract - confidence, evidence, predicted lift, override - does not.
Disagreeing, all the way through.
The override dialog is the only surface in the product that calculates, in plain numbers, how much weight a user's input will carry before it's submitted. The corrected card is the only element that never vanishes. The log is the only place the user's corrections speak back to them, later.
One engine, three volumes.
Cerberus is in free beta — every plan is open at no charge until the beta closes. Paid billing begins after that date.
- 10 evaluations / day
- 1 project
- no citation testing
- 200 evaluations / day
- unlimited projects
- 20 citation tests / day
- batch scoring, 20 at a time
- 1,000 evaluations / day
- unlimited projects
- 50 citation tests / day
- batch scoring, 50 at a time