# The life of an action

> An action starts as a recommendation, gets started, worked, drafted, approved and published. Here is every state it can be in and whose turn it is.

Source: https://eoma.ai/docs/concepts/life-of-an-action
Product: EOMA — AI search visibility for brands (https://eoma.ai)
Last updated: 2026-10-07

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## In 10 seconds

- An action moves through a small, fixed set of states, and every one of them is either waiting on EOMA or waiting on you.
- Pressing **Start** hands the job to EOMA and cannot be undone. It uses one of the jobs your plan has EOMA do for you.
- The last step — approving where the work goes — is always yours, because EOMA will not publish to your live site without being told to.

## The short version

Your board is a short list of specific jobs: this page needs writing, this claim
needs a source, this profile needs correcting. On Starter it holds six fixed
tasks, each coming back on its own schedule; on Growth and above, EOMA also turns
every week's findings into new ones.

The board is cut by **whose turn it is**. *Waiting for you to start* holds the
offers nobody has taken. *EOMA does these* holds the work EOMA has claimed and is
working on. *Waiting for your review* holds everything that has stopped until you
decide something. EOMA can do any action on the board, and you can do any of them
yourself with the steps inside it.

Nothing happens on a row until you press **Start**. Before that it is an offer,
not work in flight. This distinction was worth rebuilding the board over: rows
sitting under a header saying "EOMA is handling these" while nothing had been
charged and nothing was running read as progress that did not exist.

Once started, the row is claimed, an agent works it, and it comes back to you with
something to approve. The whole rest of this page is the vocabulary for the middle
part.

## How it works

1. **The row is generated.** A fixed task arrives on its own schedule and comes
   back after you finish it, never more than one returning in the same week. On
   Growth and above, EOMA also writes new recommendations every week, up to ten
   open at a time, and tops the list up as you close things, so the board never
   becomes a backlog nobody reads.

2. **You press Start, and EOMA takes the job.** A confirmation says what
   happens and what it uses: EOMA starts working and comes back with a draft in
   about two days, nothing is published until you approve it, and the job is
   counted on your plan. On Free and Starter it says how many jobs will be left;
   on Growth and Scale it says the job holds one of the places running at once
   until it finishes. There is no un-start. If you would rather handle a row
   yourself, open it and follow its steps, or use "I've already done this";
   neither uses anything.

3. **An agent works it.** It reads your brand data, decides whether the
   recommendation is still valid, prepares the work, and posts progress onto the
   row as it goes. If it needs a fact only you have, it stops and asks.

4. **A draft comes back for approval.** For most kinds of work the agent produces
   something concrete — a page, a schema block, a correction — and parks it.
   Nothing goes anywhere until you approve.

5. **You choose the destination.** Approving opens a fork, because the two
   destinations do not promise the same thing:

   | Destination | What happens |
   |---|---|
   | Your site (WordPress) | The draft is written to your live site as it stands. Visitors see it immediately, and the action closes itself as done. |
   | Your code repository (GitHub) | A pull request is opened. Nothing is written directly, you see the change line by line, and nothing goes live until you merge. |

6. **The row closes.** On the live-site path it closes automatically. On the pull
   request path, someone has to confirm the change is actually live.

**The states a row can be in**, and what each one means in plain terms:

| The board says | It means | Whose turn |
|---|---|---|
| Waiting for you to start | An offer nobody has taken. Nothing has been used. | Yours, if you want it |
| Working on it | An agent is actively progressing it | EOMA |
| Needs your input | The agent asked a question it cannot answer for you | Yours |
| Review the draft | Work is finished and parked, waiting on your approval | Yours |
| Review & merge | A pull request is open on your repository | Yours |
| Connect to publish | The work exists but there is no connected site to send it to | Yours |
| Approved, not yet out | You approved and the publish has not fired yet | EOMA |
| Published, not closed | It went out and nobody has confirmed it | EOMA |
| Done / Failed | Terminal. Stays in your notifications for seven days, then it is history | Nobody |

An unstarted row never waits on anybody. If a row is asking you for something, it
has been started.

## What this means for you

**Start is irreversible and it takes a seat.** There is no un-start. On Growth
three jobs can be in flight at once (six on Scale) and a seat frees the moment one
reaches done or is removed. On Free EOMA does 2 jobs for you and on Starter 3;
that number is for the life of the plan, and a job does not come back when it
finishes. When Starter's are used, Start says so and points you to the action's
own steps and to the plans; on Free the other cards wait behind a lock until you
upgrade.
The seat meter counts the rows in the in-progress band, so the two cannot
disagree — with one short-lived exception: work already in flight before
2026-09-08 does not take a seat, so until those jobs finish the band can hold
more rows than you have seats.

**"Connect to publish" ranks below anything already finished.** A parked draft on
a brand with no connected site still says *review the draft*, not *connect
something first* — because you can open it, export it as Markdown, HTML or PDF,
copy it as a prompt, apply it yourself, and mark the row done. Connecting a site
makes that automatic; it is not a gate on getting the work.

**When you merge a pull request, EOMA does not notice on its own yet.** There is
no webhook watching your repository, so the row stays In progress until somebody
closes it. One customer's pull request sat open for eight days looking like work
in flight. If you merge something, tell us or close the row — this is a known gap
and it is being fixed.

**A row that says nothing for days is worth asking about.** The board shows
"taken on N days ago · no update yet" for exactly this reason.

**Removing a suggestion is allowed, and only before it starts.** A row you have
started cannot be dismissed; a row you have not can, and it can be restored.

## Common misunderstandings

| People assume | Actually |
|---|---|
| "The recommendations are EOMA's to-do list, so they will get done." | Nothing is claimed until you press Start. Before that a row is an offer, and it waits under **Waiting for you to start** until you take it or do it yourself. |
| "Approving publishes it." | Approving asks where it should go. The live-site path publishes immediately; the repository path opens a pull request and stops. |
| "If EOMA cannot publish it, I cannot use it." | Every draft waiting for you can be taken away as Markdown, HTML or PDF, or copied as a prompt, from its last step. Before a draft exists, the action's instructions can be copied as a prompt for your own AI. |
| "In progress · 3/6 means I have used three of my six." | It means three are running and your bank holds six. The note beside it says how many remain. |
| "I can start six things and pause four." | Starting uses the job at the moment of the click. There is no pause and no refund. |
| "Failed means EOMA broke." | Often it means the work could not be completed as scoped — a site that blocks access, a fact nobody could confirm. The row carries the reason. |

## Related

- [Actions](/docs/pages/actions) — the board itself
- [Actions](/docs/pages/actions) — where the week's list is worked
- [Plans and limits](/docs/start-here/plans-and-limits) — how many executions your plan includes