Frase Review: My Honest Experience Using This AI Content Tool

Welcome to my Frase review.

⚠️ Updated for 2026 — Frase has changed significantly since I first published this review in 2023. The $1 trial is gone, pricing has been completely restructured, and the platform has added AI Visibility tracking, Brand Voice, Content Playbooks, and a fully rebuilt content generation workflow.

I've rewritten this from scratch with real screenshots from my own site using it as a test subject. The free version lets you do pretty much the same, so I strongly suggest you click the button below to try it.

You don't have to enter a credit card or Paypal. It's a true trial that you rarely see nowadays so give it a go!

My Frase Rating ⭐ 4.3/5

Frase is one of the most complete AI content tools available for bloggers and affiliate marketers who want a guided workflow from research to published article. The onboarding alone impressed me, and the content research process is genuinely fast and thorough. The main sticking point is pricing — the entry plan is more expensive than it used to be. I'll cover everything below.

What Is Frase?

Frase is an AI-powered content research, writing, and optimization platform. It was founded in 2016 in Boston and has grown into one of the more complete tools in the AI content space. The core idea is simple: instead of guessing what to write or how to structure your article, Frase analyzes what's already ranking and builds you a data-driven blueprint before you write a single word.

What makes Frase different from a lot of AI writing tools is that it combines three things that usually require separate subscriptions — content research, AI writing, and SEO optimization scoring — all in one place. If you want to compare how it stacks up against a pure optimization tool, check out my Surfer SEO vs Frase comparison.

How I Started Using Frase

I first picked up Frase way back in November 2020 on an AppSumo deal. Back then it was a very different product — they were running their own in-house AI model and honestly, the content output was pretty rough. Maybe 20% of what it generated was actually usable.

Fast forward to 2026 and Frase has completely rebuilt itself. The AI is now powered by modern large language models, the interface has been overhauled, and the feature set has expanded dramatically. I recently signed up again for a fresh look using my own site drews-review.com — and the results genuinely impressed me. I'll show you exactly what I found below with real screenshots throughout.

My Experience Setting Up Frase in 2026

The onboarding experience is one of the first things that stood out to me. When you sign up, Frase doesn't just drop you into a blank dashboard. It asks for your website URL and immediately starts analyzing your content, finding your competitors, and identifying growth opportunities.

The analysis runs through seven steps automatically — mapping your website, identifying your expertise, understanding your business, discovering competitors, evaluating competitor relevance, and finding growth opportunities.

The whole thing takes one to two minutes.

When it finished analyzing drews-review.com, here's what it came back with:

30 pages found, 10 topics identified, and 7 competitors discovered. What really got my attention was how accurately Frase identified my business — it correctly classified drews-review.com as a "B2C Affiliate Marketing and Digital Entrepreneurship Education Blog" targeting aspiring online entrepreneurs and side-hustlers.

It also identified the right competitor matching criteria: online business educational focus, SaaS and course review model, B2C beginner-centric content, and affiliate-supported revenue model. That's not generic — that's accurate.

From there, Frase presented the competitors it found and asked me to confirm which ones to track.

It found 7 competitors including milesbeckler.com at 63% relevance, affiliatewp.com at 59%, breezy.io at 57%, and yuko.so at 56%. You can also add your own competitor domains manually. Some of the suggestions like squarespace.com at 18% weren't relevant to my niche, but the top four were spot on. I like that you get to choose rather than having the tool decide for you.

After selecting competitors, Frase named my workspace and gave me two options for getting started.

You can either run a site audit to find SEO issues to fix, or check AI visibility to see how AI engines see your brand. I ran both — and I'll cover what I found in the features section below.

How Does Frase Work?

The core workflow in Frase follows a logical sequence: research a topic, build a content brief based on what's already ranking, generate a draft using AI, and then optimize it for SEO. Each step flows into the next without you having to switch between tools.

When you click the new content button, you get four options.

Generate Article is the recommended option — AI-powered research, outline, and content generation all in one flow. Optimize Existing lets you import a URL, paste content, or pull from Notion or Google Docs to improve what you already have. Import Brief is a newer feature that lets you bring in an existing brief from PDF, Google Docs, or a URL. And Content Playbooks are pre-built multi-step workflows for specific content types — SEO Blog Post, Product Page, Quick Update, and more.

I find the Content Playbooks particularly useful for bloggers. The SEO Blog Post playbook is a 5-step guided workflow that handles research, brief creation, human review, and generation in sequence. It's the kind of structured approach that removes the paralysis of starting from scratch.

Key Features

Content Research and Brief Generation

This is where Frase really earns its price tag. When I entered "how to make money with AI" as a test keyword, here's what the setup screen looked like:

You choose the content type — Blog Post, Landing Page, and more — along with tone, target word count, writing angle (Experience, Research, or Teaching), and content depth (Beginner, Intermediate, or Advanced). Frase automatically detected that Teaching was the right angle for my keyword based on my site context, which is a nice touch.

Scroll down further and you get even more control.

There's a Key Takeaway field that Frase auto-populated with "Understand different ways to generate income using AI." You can attach Reference Documents to guide the content generation — style guides, product info, FAQs.

There's a Source Preferences section where you can prioritize specific authority sources or blacklist competitor domains from appearing in your content. And there's a "What makes YOUR take different?" field where you describe your unique angle. That last field is something I think a lot of people will skip, but filling it in genuinely improves the output quality.

Once you hit Generate, Frase runs through six research steps automatically.

The first step is decoding search intent. For "how to make money with AI" it came back with 90% confidence that the intent is Informational, recommending a How-To Tutorial format.

It also identified what searchers actually want — practical methods to generate income, opportunities and ideas for financial gain, and guidance on implementing AI tools. That level of search intent analysis used to require a separate tool entirely.

Step two expands keywords. Frase found 29 related keywords with search volume, keyword difficulty, CPC, and coverage data all in one view. "AI content creation" came in at 18,100 monthly searches, "AI business" at 9,900, and "AI SEO" at 8,100.

This directly addresses one of the weaknesses in my original review — Frase's keyword data is now much more comprehensive than it was a few years ago.

Step three analyzes the SERP. Frase pulled 7 sources and 90 headings from the top-ranking pages — reddit.com, wix.com, printful.com, medium.com, and coursera.org — including word counts, heading counts, and which keywords each article covers.

You can click into any source to expand it and select headings for your outline.

Step four finds questions your audience is asking. Frase surfaced 12 questions from two sources — People Also Ask (4 questions including "How can I use AI to make money now?" and "Which AI tool is best for earning money?") and Reddit (5 questions from real forum discussions).

The Reddit sourcing is a nice differentiator — it surfaces the questions real people are asking in conversational language, which is perfect for FAQ sections.

Step five identifies content gaps. This is one of my favorite parts of the whole workflow. Frase found 3 opportunities: a Perspective gap at 75% confidence, an Uncovered topic at 85% confidence, and an Audience question at 80% confidence.

For each one it tells you exactly what to add and why competitors are winning on that angle. This is actionable intelligence that most people would spend hours finding manually.

Step six builds the outline. In 23.3 seconds Frase generated a 12-section structure with H2 and H3 headings already mapped out — Prerequisites, three implementation steps with supporting H3s, and a limitations section. It's a solid starting framework that you can review and customize before generating the full draft.

All six steps ran automatically without me doing anything after hitting Generate. From keyword entry to complete outline took under two minutes.

Site Audit

After completing onboarding I ran a site audit on drews-review.com. Here's what came back:

The audit scored my site at 65 out of 100, analyzed 18 pages, found 0 critical issues, and flagged 104 total issues. The top fix actions were Missing Viewport Meta on 18 pages, Multiple H1 Tags on 1 page, and an Orphan Page.

The Multiple H1 Tags finding is interesting given the SEO work I've been doing — worth investigating. The audit also automatically triggered AI visibility checking across 5 prompts based on my business profile.

The audit tool is most useful for finding quick-win pages to improve. Connect your Google Search Console and Frase will surface pages sitting at position 8 to 20 that are close to ranking but need a content score improvement. If you want a more granular version of this workflow, my Surfer SEO review covers how Surfer handles the same process with more data depth.

AI Visibility Tracking

This is one of Frase's newer features and one that sets it apart from most content tools. After running the audit, I clicked through to see my AI visibility results.

The dashboard shows Share of Voice, Sentiment, Trend Velocity, Appearance Rate, Authority Rate, Opportunities, and Momentum — all tracked across AI search engines like ChatGPT, Google AI, and Perplexity.

For drews-review.com, my share of voice was 18% while my main competitor milesbeckler.com had 82%. My appearance rate was 20% — 1 mention and 1 citation. Authority Rate was 0% meaning I'm not yet being cited as a primary source. Frase flagged 2 opportunities where competitors win on AI search queries but I don't appear at all.

The appearance rate over time chart showed something interesting. My rate started at 3% average and spiked to 20% right around the March 2026 Google Core Update. I think that spike is directly related to the content work I've been doing on the site over the past few months — and seeing it reflected in AI visibility data as well as traditional search is genuinely encouraging.

If you're a brand new site or have low domain authority, you won't see much data here yet. But the benchmark from day one means you can track your progress over time as your authority grows.

AI Writing

Frase includes a built-in AI writer on all plans. Once your outline is ready you can generate a full draft, or use the AI to write individual sections, rewrite paragraphs, or expand on points you want to develop further.

The quality has improved enormously since I first used Frase in 2020. Back then with their in-house AI, maybe 20% of the output was usable. Today the output reads cleanly, structures itself naturally, and doesn't require the heavy editing it used to.

You'll still need to fact-check, inject your own voice, and make edits — never publish AI content word for word. But the draft quality is now good enough to use as a genuine starting point.

Brand Voice

Frase can learn your writing style. You set up a Brand Voice profile by uploading examples of your writing or pointing it to your existing content, and Frase incorporates your tone into everything it generates. You get one profile on Starter, five on Professional, and custom profiles on Scale.

For affiliate marketers running multiple sites or content teams managing different clients, this is a real time saver. Getting consistent tone across a high volume of content without editing every paragraph is one of the practical improvements Frase delivers.

Optimization Scoring

As you write or after importing existing content, Frase shows you a real-time optimization score based on the NLP keywords your competitors are using. You can see which keywords to add, which ones you've over-used, and how your score compares to the average of the top-ranking pages.

I feel like this feature is slightly less precise than what Surfer SEO offers in its content editor, but it's more than adequate for most bloggers. The advantage is that you don't need a separate Surfer subscription to get it.

Frase Pricing

Frase has three plans. All include a free trial with no payment details required — that's a genuine advantage over tools like Surfer that require a credit card upfront.

Annual billing saves 20% across all plans.

Starter Plan — $49/month ($39/month annually)

The Starter plan is for solo content creators. You get one user seat, one domain, 10 AI-optimized articles per month, 50 audit pages, AI visibility tracking across 2 platforms, a content calendar, auto internal linking, one Brand Voice profile, and API and MCP access. For a solo blogger publishing up to 10 SEO articles per month this covers everything you need.

Professional Plan — $129/month ($103/month annually)

The Professional plan is for content teams and growing brands. You get 3 seats, 5 domains, 40 AI-optimized articles per month, 250 audit pages, AI visibility tracking across 3 platforms, a content calendar, auto internal linking, 5 brand voice profiles, and 25 reference documents. If you're managing content for multiple sites or working with a small team, this is where Frase starts to feel like a proper content operations platform.

Scale Plan — $299/month ($239/month annually)

The Scale plan is for agencies and high-volume teams. You get 5 seats, 10 domains, 100 AI-optimized articles per month, 1,000 audit pages, AI visibility tracking across 5 platforms, multi-channel content creation, data exports, and custom brand voice profiles. For most solo bloggers and small affiliate operations, the Starter or Professional plan will be sufficient.

Who Should Use Frase?

Frase is the right tool if you're a blogger, affiliate marketer, or content creator who wants a complete workflow from research to published article without paying for multiple separate tools. The combination of content brief generation, AI writing, SEO optimization scoring, and AI visibility tracking in one platform is hard to beat at the Starter price point.

It's particularly well-suited to people who are newer to SEO content. The guided workflow removes the guesswork from every step — you're never staring at a blank page wondering what to write or how to structure it.

Content teams managing multiple sites or clients will find the Professional plan covers most of their needs. The multi-domain support, team seats, and brand voice profiles make it practical for agency work without enterprise pricing.

If you're an experienced SEO writer who mainly needs the most precise on-page optimization tool available and already has a content workflow you're happy with, you might find Surfer SEO a better fit. The two tools serve different workflows — Frase is better for end-to-end content production, Surfer is better for surgical optimization of individual pages.

Pros and Cons

Pros:

The onboarding experience is one of the best I've seen from any content tool — it analyzes your site, identifies your business, finds your competitors, and gets you set up in under two minutes.

The six-step content research process is fast, thorough, and produces genuinely useful output.

AI Visibility tracking is built into all plans with no extra charge. The free trial requires no payment details. The all-in-one approach means you don't need a separate AI writer subscription.

Content Playbooks make the workflow accessible even for beginners. Keyword expansion now includes difficulty, CPC, and coverage data which addresses a weakness in earlier versions.

Cons:

The Starter plan at $49/month is more expensive than the old entry-level pricing.

The AI writing quality, while much improved, still needs editing and fact-checking before publishing.

The optimization scoring is less granular than Surfer SEO's content editor. The 10 AI article limit on Starter is modest if you're publishing frequently.

Auto internal linking works better when you have a larger content library already published.

Frase Alternatives

Surfer SEO is the strongest alternative if precision on-page optimization is your priority. It's more expensive at entry level but the content editor is the most data-driven optimization tool available for individual pages. Read my full Surfer SEO review for a detailed breakdown, or see how the two tools compare in my Surfer SEO vs Frase comparison.

ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini are worth considering if you just need AI writing assistance without the SEO optimization layer. All three have generous free tiers. If you're a light user who mainly needs help drafting content and isn't focused on data-driven optimization, one of these may cover your needs at no cost.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Frase good for SEO?

Yes. Frase analyzes the top-ranking pages for your keyword and tells you what keywords to include, how long your article should be, what headings to use, and what questions to answer. The optimization scoring updates in real time as you write. It's a solid on-page SEO tool, though Surfer SEO offers more granular data if precision optimization is your main need.

Does Frase have a free trial?

Yes. Frase offers a free trial on all plans and you don't need to enter payment details to get started. That makes it one of the lower-risk tools to test in this category.

Can Frase write full articles for me?

Yes. The Generate Article workflow produces a full draft including research, outline, and written content. You'll need to edit, fact-check, and add your own voice before publishing — but the draft quality is good enough to use as a real starting point.

How does Frase compare to Surfer SEO?

Frase is better for end-to-end content production — research, writing, and optimization in one place. Surfer SEO is better for precise on-page optimization of individual pages. Frase is more beginner-friendly and cheaper at entry level. See my full Surfer SEO vs Frase comparison for a detailed breakdown.

What happened to the Frase $1 trial?

The $1 trial no longer exists. Frase now offers a free trial on all plans with no payment details required, which is actually a better deal than the old $1 offer.

Is Frase worth it for affiliate marketers?

Yes, particularly at the Starter plan level. The content brief generation and AI writing workflow can significantly speed up article production. The AI Visibility tracking is a useful bonus for understanding how AI search engines see your site relative to competitors.

Does Frase integrate with WordPress?

Yes. Frase integrates with WordPress as well as Google Docs, Notion, and other platforms for importing and exporting content.

My Final Verdict

I've been following Frase since 2020 and the version I tested for this review is by far the best it's ever been. The onboarding is impressive, the content research workflow is fast and thorough, and the AI Visibility tracking adds a genuinely useful layer that most competing tools don't offer at this price point.

I think Frase is the best value all-in-one content tool for bloggers and affiliate marketers who want a guided workflow from blank page to published article. At $39/month annually on the Starter plan, you get research, AI writing, optimization scoring, and AI visibility tracking without needing to stitch together multiple subscriptions.

The honest caveat is that the AI output still needs human editing. Don't publish anything Frase generates word for word — fact-check it, rewrite where necessary, and add your own perspective. Think of Frase as a very capable research assistant and first-draft writer, not a one-click publishing machine.

If you want to try it out, the free trial is the right place to start. You can run your own site through the onboarding analysis and see your AI visibility data before spending anything.