People and roles

A workspace can have more than one person in it. People is where you add them and decide what each one can do, described as "Add the people who work on this site, then choose what each person can do."

The list

People and access shows everyone with a count above it, such as "3 people · 0 pending". <!-- example --> Each row carries a name, an email address, a role and a status, with the date they joined. Your own row is marked You.

Above the list are a search box and a Member status filter offering all, active, disabled, archived and pending invites.

Adding someone

Add user takes an email address and a role. What happens next depends on whether they already have a Rankbench account, and the form says so: "Existing Rankbench users are added now. New users receive an email invitation."

For somebody new, you get "Invitation email queued. They can join after verifying this email address." If the email cannot be queued, Rankbench tells you rather than pretending it went: the invitation is saved, and you can invite the address again to retry or ask them to sign up with it.

Note what this is not. Adding a person to your workspace is not the same as inviting another website to Rankbench. That is a different thing with a different journey, covered in inviting a website to Rankbench.

The roles

Admin reviews submissions, assigns approvers and manages publication URLs. In practice this is the run-the-site role: settings, people, guest post rules, swaps, the calendar.

SEO agent works on SEO and collaborations without administrative access. This is the role for an agency or a freelancer you have brought in. They can work in the audit, the calendar and the exchange, and they can manage a site's content details and collaboration options, but the site's identity and its administrative controls stay with the owner. The site's settings page tells them so directly.

Internal Author contributes content inside a workspace.

Author submits articles and reviews results for their own content.

Approver reviews assigned articles and individual hyperlinks. See final review and the Approver role.

Super Admin manages platform-wide settings, users and roles.

Acting on a member

Each row that can be acted on has a menu. From it you can change the role, deactivate or reactivate the person, and remove them from the workspace. There is also Transfer Super Admin where that applies.

Two things are deliberately awkward. Your own row cannot act on itself, so you cannot lock yourself out by accident. And the irreversible action sits apart from the reversible ones, so removing somebody is never one slip away from deactivating them.

Every change is recorded. The form says as much: "Role changes are enforced by controlled database actions." What that means for you is that a role change is checked by the server rather than trusted from the browser, and it lands in the audit log.

Rows marked Managed by platform belong to platform superadmins rather than to your workspace, and cannot be changed from here.

What the person receives

Somebody added to a workspace gets a notification saying so, and a role change or a removal generates one too. Whether those also arrive by email depends on their own preferences, under the workspace access category. See how Rankbench tells you things.

Where to go next

To bring in an agency who will work on your SEO, inviting a website to Rankbench covers the consent step that role alone does not. For what a workspace holds in the first place, read workspaces, the switcher and your view.