The content plan tells elev8tor how many pages a site wants each month (0 to 12), which kinds (blog, service, location, product), whether a person approves drafts before they go out, and which week of the month the cycle starts.
With a plan, Content Ideas builds specs for the top ideas, competitors first, until the month’s count is reached: each spec is a brief with target words, H1 and title choices, headings, entities with target mentions, questions, schema, links in and out and competitors to model. Credits are checked first (0.5 each); if they run short, it builds what it can and shows a credits-short note. A spec never starts a write on its own.
A site with Autopilot on has a plan by definition: the Autopilot tier sets the number of posts, and the Autopilot module switches it on or off. The Small Business bundle includes 8 posts a month, so those sites have a plan as well. The weekly digest switch for the Content Queue also lives here.