Two things you should know about how this site works.
1. Affiliate links
Some links on this site are affiliate links. If you click one and buy something, we may receive a commission from the seller. The price you pay is the same either way — the commission comes out of the seller’s margin, not your pocket.
We use affiliate links because they let us keep the site free to read without putting everything behind a paywall. We pick what we recommend on its merits. We don’t recommend products we wouldn’t use ourselves, and we don’t take undisclosed paid placements. Every recommendation post is reviewed against the same editorial standard as the briefs.
The affiliate networks and partners we currently work with may include:
- Amazon Associates
- Bookshop.org
- Impact (various advertisers)
- Direct partner programs (course platforms, app subscriptions, etc.)
If a specific recommendation is sponsored or paid placement — distinct from a standard affiliate link — we will say so explicitly in the post.
2. How the briefs are written
We are a small publication, and a lot of work sits behind every brief. Here’s the actual process:
- A custom pipeline scans the Swiss Ephemeris — the same astronomical dataset professional astrologers and NASA-derived almanacs rely on — for the month’s transits, stations, ingresses, and lunations.
- Each event is mapped into whole-sign houses for the twelve signs and scored for relevance using rules we’ve built and tuned over months of work.
- The structured per-sign event data is then turned into draft prose with the help of a language model, working inside a tightly-scoped voice specification we wrote and maintain — banlists, sentence-length caps, mandatory date and planet naming, section-opener rules, and accessibility passes.
- Every draft is checked against a six-line editorial eval (specific dates named, planets named, no banlist hits, sentence-length cap, no vague hedges, valid section openers) before it can ship.
- The draft is read, corrected where needed, and edited before publication.
The astrology itself is not generated. The event data is real. The house mapping is real. The dates and transits are real. The system that decides what matters for each sign each month is the result of human work — months of building, testing, and tuning. The model is one tool inside that system; it helps turn structured data into readable prose, and nothing it produces ships without passing the editorial eval and a human review.
We’re transparent about how this works because you should know what you’re reading. If you want to go deeper, the About page explains the method in more detail.
Questions: hello@theastrobrief.com