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, nothing does: every change lands on a draft first, and you see a preview before it counts.
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 reject and the draft is discarded, live site untouched.
Who presses that button depends on which AI you're using. Bernard in your bernard dashboard can't publish at all — the Approve button on the preview page 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.
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.
How undo works
Before approval, undo is just not approving. After approval, bernard keeps a full year of version history: 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 Versions. "Put it back how it was last week" always works.
The prompt
“Show me what's waiting for my approval on my site, and explain each change in plain words before I decide.”
The [bracketed] parts are yours to fill in. First time? Connect bernard to your AI over MCP — a one-time setup in bernard → your site → Use your own AI — then paste the prompt above.
Questions people ask
- Does the AI publish changes to my website by itself?
- No — not on its own initiative. Every change lands on a draft first, and it's instructed to publish only when you ask it to in plain words. Bernard in your bernard dashboard can't publish at all — the Approve button on the preview page is yours alone. 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. Reject the draft with one click and the live site is untouched — or tell the AI which part to redo and approve the corrected version instead.
- How do I undo a change after I've approved it?
- bernard keeps a full year of your site's history. Ask the AI to put a page back how it was, or restore any published version yourself from your bernard dashboard (Sites → your site → Versions).
- 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, and you approve them together after reading the list and the preview. If one change is wrong, ask the AI to fix it before you approve.