INDEXIA BLOG
The Editorial Agent: AI-Powered Index Review That Thinks Before It Acts
AI-generated indexes are comprehensive. They capture terms a human indexer might miss, surface patterns across hundreds of pages, and produce results in minutes rather than days. But comprehensiveness is not the same as polish.
A raw AI extraction might include near-duplicate terms that should be merged. It might miss a cross-reference that would help readers connect related topics. A subentry label might not quite match the context of every mention it covers. And the whole thing needs to conform to the Chicago Manual of Style — the industry standard for book indexing.
These are the kinds of editorial judgments that traditionally require a human indexer to review the entire index with fresh eyes. Indexia's Editorial Agent does exactly that — but as an AI, trained on CMOS indexing guidelines.
What It Does
The Editorial Agent conducts a five-part review of your completed index:
1. Quality Audit Examines every term for naming issues and substantiveness. Renames terms that don't follow Chicago Manual of Style conventions (personal name inversion, capitalization). Flags or removes terms that appear only in passing — a single mention on a bibliography page, for instance, rather than substantive discussion.
2. Merge Review Identifies terms that refer to the same concept but were extracted separately. "Artificial intelligence" and "AI" might both appear as distinct terms. The agent investigates their mentions, reads the actual book text, and decides whether to merge them — or whether they serve distinct purposes in the index.
3. Hierarchy Review Evaluates parent-child relationships. Should "supply chain turnover" be a subentry under "supply chains"? The agent reads the synthesis and mentions for both terms, checks whether one is genuinely a specific aspect of the other, and creates or adjusts the relationship accordingly.
4. Cross-Reference Enhancement Builds a network of "see" and "see also" references. When a book discusses thermodynamics and energy as deeply intertwined concepts, readers searching for one should be pointed to the other. The agent identifies these connections by analyzing term co-occurrence, semantic similarity, and the actual content of the book.
5. Subentry Review Validates that every subentry label accurately reflects the content of its mentions. Before renaming a subentry, the agent reads every mention excerpt to verify the new label fits. If even one mention doesn't match the proposed label, the agent considers splitting rather than renaming.
How It Works
The Editorial Agent uses Claude in an agentic tool-calling loop. Rather than processing your entire index in one monolithic prompt, it works like an investigator: it receives a summary of the index, then selectively queries for details on the terms that need attention.
The agent has access to a toolkit of 16 specialized tools:
- Term details and batch lookups — fetch synthesis, mentions, and hierarchy for any term
- Mention excerpts — read the actual surrounding text for up to 20 mentions per term
- Page text — read the full text of specific pages when deeper context is needed
- Relationship groups — see how terms cluster semantically
- Cross-reference validation — check for circular references, orphaned entries, and bidirectionality
- Trim analysis — AI-ranked list of terms by importance
This means the agent doesn't waste tokens reading data it doesn't need. For a 200-term index, it might investigate 30-40 terms closely while making quick decisions about the rest. The result is a thorough review at a fraction of the cost of processing every term in detail.
Built on the Chicago Manual of Style
Every decision the Editorial Agent makes is grounded in the Chicago Manual of Style (CMOS), the standard reference for book indexing in academic and trade publishing. The agent enforces CMOS rules for personal name inversion, capitalization, cross-reference formatting, subentry structure, and term selection. This is not generic AI editing — it is indexing-specific editorial review that follows the same standards a professional human indexer would apply.
Transparent Decisions
Every decision the agent makes includes three things:
- The action — what it wants to do (merge, rename, create cross-reference, etc.)
- The reasoning — a plain-English explanation of why
- A confidence score — how certain it is, from 0 to 1
Decisions above the confidence threshold (default 0.6) are executed automatically. Decisions below the threshold are deferred — saved with full reasoning for you to review and approve or reject.
This means you always know what changed and why. No black-box edits.
Pricing
The Editorial Agent is included in the Editorial Assistant tier, priced at up to $299 depending on your book's length. Select it during project creation and the agent runs automatically after extraction is complete — no extra steps required.
You can also upgrade an existing project to include editorial review at any time.
Get Started
Select the Editorial Assistant tier when creating your next project to get AI-powered editorial review included automatically.