Personas

Personas, sometimes called ICPs (Ideal Customer Profiles), tell zued who your content is addressing. zued uses them to generate more realistic audit prompts — prompts that reflect the context and intent real users carry into AI conversations, rather than generic, one-size-fits-all queries.

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How zued builds personas

zued doesn’t ask you to create personas from scratch. It extracts them from your page content automatically:

1. Signal extraction — as each URL is crawled, zued identifies who the page is written for: the situation it addresses, the pain points it speaks to, the language and vocabulary it uses, and the level of background knowledge it assumes. A single page can contribute multiple persona signals.
2. Persona merging — similar personas detected across different pages are merged into unified personas. For example, “Marketing-Leiter im B2B” and “B2B marketing manager” are recognized as the same persona regardless of language or wording.
3. URL mapping — each persona is linked to the specific pages whose signals contributed to it. This mapping determines which personas are used when generating prompts for a specific URL. A URL with strong signal contribution to a persona gets that persona’s context embedded in its prompts.
4. Confirmation — you review and confirm (or edit) the generated personas before any prompts are created.

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Importing your own personas

If you already maintain personas — in a sales deck, a research brief, or another tool — you don’t have to rely only on what zued extracts. Upload a PDF, Word, or text document during review and zued reads the personas out of it and adds them to your persona set alongside the extracted ones. Imported personas are labelled Imported so you always know which came from your document. Imported personas are matched to the pages they actually fit. Rather than attaching an imported persona to every page in your project, zued weighs it against what each of your pages is written for and links it only to the pages whose audience it genuinely matches — with the same page-level evidence you see behind extracted personas. If a persona can’t be placed with confidence, it’s added unmapped so you can assign its pages yourself. This keeps an imported persona from being voiced on pages it has nothing to do with, which would otherwise dilute the prompts generated for those pages.

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What each persona contains

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The persona detail view

Open any persona to see it in full. The detail view puts one persona front and centre and lets you page through the rest with the arrow keys, so you can get to know your whole audience without losing your place:

• Who they are — the complete persona: situation, pain point, emotional driver, language style, and key needs.
• Which pages inform them, and why — every page mapped to the persona, each with a short “why here” note drawn from what that page is written for, so you can see the evidence behind the placement. Pages you added by hand are marked as manually mapped.
• Edit in place — change any field, or adjust which pages inform the persona, without leaving the view.
• Export — download your personas as a shareable bundle to hand to a colleague or reuse elsewhere.

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A recognisable image for every persona

Each persona carries its own image — a brand-styled illustration generated for that persona — so personas are easy to tell apart at a glance. The image is a neutral, featureless figure styled to match your brand: it’s a visual anchor for the persona, not a depiction of a real individual. It updates when the persona’s details change, so it always reflects the current persona.

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Editing personas

You can edit any persona from its detail view, both while you’re reviewing and after you’ve confirmed (see Editing personas after confirmation below). The editable fields are:

• Context — free text
• Core situation — free text
• Primary pain point — free text
• Emotional driver — select: Urgency, Pressure, Frustration, Aspiration, Curiosity, Fear
• Language style — select: Casual, Professional, Technical, Analytical
• Search behavior — select: Thorough Researcher, Quick Decision Maker, Analytical Validator, Network-Driven
• Key needs — comma-separated list

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Adding and removing personas

During review you can also add a persona that the automatic extraction missed, or delete one that doesn’t fit. A persona you add starts blank — fill in at least its situation and pain point before confirming. zued won’t let you confirm while any persona is still empty, since an empty persona produces meaningless prompts.

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Managing pages per persona

Each persona lists the pages mapped to it. From that list you can add another of your project’s pages to the persona, move a page to a different persona, or remove a page from the persona. Pages you map by hand are marked as added manually (they carry no extracted signal evidence).

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Refitting a persona to its pages

Changing which pages inform a persona can change who that persona should represent. Whenever you add, remove, or move a page, zued suggests a refit — it rewrites the persona’s description so it fits all the pages now mapped to it, instead of leaving wording that only matched the original set. You can also trigger a refit yourself at any time from the persona detail view. A refit only ever rewrites personas that zued generated. If you’ve edited a persona by hand, your wording stands — zued never overwrites a hand-written persona automatically. That way you keep full control of the personas you author, while zued keeps the ones it generated in step with their pages.

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Editing personas after confirmation

Confirming your personas isn’t a lock-in. You can keep refining them as your understanding of your audience sharpens — edit a persona’s wording, delete one that no longer fits, or change which pages inform it, all from the same detail view. Changes you make after confirmation take effect at your next weekly snapshot. zued flags the prompts on the pages a change affects and rebuilds just those from your updated personas when the next snapshot runs, so your audit stays in step with your personas without you regenerating anything by hand. Past results are never altered. Earlier snapshots keep the exact prompts and responses they ran with, so your history and week-over-week comparison stay intact. You get the benefit of sharper personas going forward without losing the baseline you’ve already built.