How do I approve or undo changes?
Letting anything edit your website - a person or an AI - only feels safe if nothing reaches your visitors by surprise. On a bernard-hosted site, changes to your pages land on a draft first, and you see a preview before they count.
The prompt
“Show me what’s waiting for my approval on my site, and explain each change in plain words before I decide.”
Signed in, Get my prompt fills in your site for you. Otherwise press Copy and fill in the [bracketed] parts. First time? Connect your AI to bernard once: Use your own AI (opens in a new tab).
One thing works differently, and it is worth knowing before it surprises you: the words inside a course lesson are not held on a draft. Adding a lesson goes through approval like any other page - but editing what an existing lesson says reaches the people already enrolled the next time they open it. There is no preview step and no Approve button for it. Course content has its own route back instead: every lesson keeps a history of what it said before, so any edit can be put back (Change the same thing in every lesson of my course covers doing and undoing this across a whole course at once). Everything below is about your pages.
How approval works
Every change the AI makes goes onto a draft - a complete copy of your site with the edits applied. The AI sends you a preview link; you open it, see exactly what your visitors would see, and read the AI’s note for each change. Press Approve and it goes live. Press Discard changes and the draft is thrown away, live site untouched.
Where the button is. Whenever changes are waiting, a green bar appears in your workshop just above the message box: it counts what’s pending, names the first few changes in plain words, offers a preview, and carries the Approve button. Approve doesn’t publish on the spot - it opens the full list first, as a checklist. Everything starts ticked; untick anything you don’t want, and the button becomes Make 4 of 5 live (whatever your numbers are). Unticked changes are removed for good when the rest go live, and it says so before you press anything. If two changes are tangled together - one builds on the other - bernard will say so and suggest keeping both or asking the AI to undo the one you don’t want.
Beside Approve, in quieter type, is Discard changes - the other answer, for when you’ve read the list and don’t want any of it. It asks you to confirm before anything is thrown away. The same list, with the same two choices, sits on your site’s own page under Site history. If you can’t see the bar, that page always knows.
The draft is shared, so it can hold other people’s work as well as yours. If it does, discarding stops and tells you who else has unpublished changes on it, for example “Sam (2) and Bernard (1)”. Nothing is thrown away yet. To keep their work, press Keep them and make the draft live or ask them first. To throw it all away, press Discard everyone’s changes. A change with no recorded author shows as “an unknown editor” and counts as someone else’s, because bernard cannot prove it was yours.
Who presses that button depends on which AI you’re using. Bernard in your bernard dashboard can’t publish at all: the Approve button is yours alone, signed in to your account. If you’ve connected your own AI over MCP, it can publish a draft when you ask it to, because it acts with your authority - but it’s instructed to do that only on your say-so, never on its own initiative, and every publish it makes is recorded in your history saying what changed and that it came from your assistant. See Is it safe to let an AI edit my site? for the full picture.
Checking his work before you approve
When Bernard changes how something looks, he opens the page in a browser and looks at it. Those pictures now come back to you: a small strip of thumbnails under his reply, labelled What I saw. Click one to see it full size.
It exists for one reason. Bernard sometimes finishes a visual change confident it worked when it didn’t, and a confident sentence is hard to argue with when you can’t see what he saw. With the picture beside the sentence you can, in about five seconds - so when he asks “does that match what you meant?”, you can answer honestly rather than take his word for it. The pictures are kept for a week, so an old conversation keeps its words but not its thumbnails.
Approving isn’t the end of the story, either. After a fix goes live, bernard re-checks it - and shows the result honestly on your site’s page. What gets checked and when is covered in How Bernard checks your site - and what he does about it.
When a change would do something, not just say something
Most changes are words and pictures. Some change what your site actually does - where a form sends what people type, whether a page forwards visitors somewhere else, what the page loads from another company. Those are worth knowing about before they go live, and they are invisible in a preview: the page looks identical either way.
So bernard says them out loud, above the list of changes, in the plainest terms it can:
A form on this page will send what visitors type to example.com, not to you.
Anyone opening this page will be sent to example.com instead.
Two things to know about these notes. They name the destination, because that is the part you can actually judge - you know whether you use that company. And they stay quiet on ordinary work: rewording a page, swapping a photo, changing a colour produces nothing, so a note appearing at all is a reason to slow down and read.
They are not a security check, and bernard does not claim they are. If a change came with something bernard could not read, it says so rather than pretend it looked. The question they help you answer is the one you are actually qualified to answer: did I ask for this, and is that the right destination?
How undo works
Before approval, undo is just not approving. After approval, bernard keeps the last 100 published versions of your site: ask the AI to restore an earlier version (which itself arrives as a draft for your approval), or do it yourself from your dashboard under your site’s Site history, where every published version has its own Restore button. Either way the old version comes back as a draft waiting for your approval, so nothing changes for your visitors until you say so - and because there’s only ever one draft, it replaces any unapproved changes you already had waiting. “Put it back how it was last week” always works.
One last thing worth knowing if you are not the only person working on your site: there is a single drafting table per site, shared by everyone and every assistant working on it, so approving picks up whatever is on it (Two of us are working on the site at the same time).
Bernard also looks after your site between conversations, working towards a goal you choose - see How Bernard looks after things for me for what he finds and how much of it, over time, you let him do without asking you first.
Bernard can also be allowed to make a few routine fixes without waiting for your approval, such as an old copyright year. Those go through the same history, marked as his, and are easy to put back (What does Bernard fix on his own?, How do I undo something Bernard did on his own?).
To look back at what you asked for in earlier sessions, see your past conversations.
Questions people ask
- Does the AI publish changes to my website by itself?
- No - not on its own initiative, unless you allow the few routine fixes described at the end of this page. Every other change to your pages lands on a draft first, and it’s instructed to publish only when you ask it to in plain words. A few things are not page changes and happen as soon as they are confirmed rather than at Approve: a file you upload can be opened at its own address straight away (no page shows it until you approve), and emails, contacts, courses, memberships, your shop, the forum and webhooks change when you or the AI confirm them. Bernard in your bernard dashboard can’t publish at all: the Approve button is yours alone. You’ll find it in a green bar just above the message box whenever changes are waiting, and on your site’s own page under Site history. Your own connected AI (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini) can put a draft live when you say so, and every publish is recorded in your version history and can be put back.
- How do I undo a change before it goes live?
- Just don’t approve it. To drop one change but keep the rest, press Approve to open the list, untick the one you don’t want, and press Make the rest live - the unticked change is removed for good. To drop the whole draft, use the quieter **Discard changes** link beside Approve: press it, confirm with **Yes, discard**, and everything waiting is thrown away with your live site untouched. If someone else (another person on your account, a connected assistant, or Bernard working on his own) also has unpublished changes on that draft, bernard names them first and asks you to press **Discard everyone’s changes** before their work goes too.
- How do I undo a change after I’ve approved it?
- bernard keeps the last 100 published versions of your site. Ask the AI to put a page back how it was, or restore any of those versions yourself from your bernard dashboard (Sites → your site → Site history). For anything older, bernard support can recover your site from backups kept up to a year.
- What if the AI made several changes - do I approve each one?
- They collect on one draft with a plain-English note beside each change. The green bar shows the first few notes, and pressing Approve opens the full list as a checklist - every change starts ticked. Untick any you don’t want and the button becomes Make 4 of 5 live (whatever your numbers are); the unticked ones are removed for good when the rest go live. If a change needs correcting rather than removing, ask the AI to fix it before you approve.
- How do I know a change is safe to approve?
- You are never asked to judge code, because nobody could. Instead, when a change would alter what your site DOES rather than what it says, bernard puts it in plain words above the list - naming the place, not the technique. “A form on this page will send what visitors type to example.com, not to you.” “Anyone opening this page will be sent to example.com instead.” Ordinary edits - new wording, a swapped photo, a colour - say nothing at all, so a note appearing means something worth a second look. The question to answer is not “is this safe?” but “did I ask for this, and is that the right destination?”
- I approved a change and the live site still shows the old version. What now?
- Ask your AI to check the publish status - it reads the real answer rather than guessing. Nearly always it is one of four things: the publish is still running (a big course site can take five minutes), the change is still sitting in the draft unapproved, your own domain is not yet pointed at bernard, or your browser is showing you a cached copy. There is a fifth, rarer one: a publish that started and did not finish. Your work is safe in your site’s history either way. If it was the rare unfinished publish, the quickest cure is to make one more small change and approve that - publishing copies the whole site across, so it carries the stranded work with it.
- My AI says my site is temporarily locked or a few seconds behind. Is my work lost?
- No. That message means our servers are briefly out of step with each other, and bernard would rather say so than show you the wrong version of your page. It normally clears within seconds. If it lasts more than a minute, ask your AI to report it to us - it has a way to do that - and we will unlock it.
- What is the “What I saw” strip under Bernard’s reply?
- When Bernard changes how something looks, he opens your page in a browser and looks at it - and those pictures now appear as small thumbnails under his reply, labelled “What I saw”. Click one to see it full size. It’s there so you can check his work against his words: if he says the grey bar now runs edge to edge and the picture shows it stopping halfway, you can say so straight away instead of finding out later. Pictures of your pages show your draft, so a page change you can see in them is not on your live site until you approve it. Notes and videos in a lesson for enrolled students are the exception: they are live for those students as soon as they are saved. A free taster lesson still waits for your approval like any page.
- The chat is too small to read while changes are waiting. Can I make it bigger?
- Yes, on a computer. Press Make the chat bigger at the top of the chat. The conversation then takes the whole width and nearly the whole height of the screen, and your site preview steps aside. Press Show my site beside the chat to bring the preview back. On a phone the chat already fills the screen; use the Your site tab to see the preview.