Last Updated on January 10, 2024 by Alex Birkett
While AI isn’t automating the entire job of SEO away, smart marketers are augmenting their human resources with AI writing and optimization tools.
SEO is a broad category that includes technical SEO, content creation and optimization, promotion, and more, so this list will include 11 of my favorite AI SEO tools across categories.
The 11 Best AI SEO Tools in 2024
- Surfer SEO
- Jasper
- GrowthBar
- Scalenut
- Frase
- Writesonic
- Keywordinsights.ai
- ChatGPT
- Midjourney
- Copy AI
Editor’s note: using some affiliate links in this post.
1. Surfer SEO
Best for: strategy and maintenance of content-driven SEO programs.
Surfer SEO is one of the coolest AI SEO tools out there.
Point of proof: I use it to help me write almost every blog post I publish on this site.
Surfer SEO does has several AI based SEO tools.
Of their key features, the best is optimizing content for search engine results pages (SERPs). It does this by reverse engineering on-page SEO signals such as word count, readability, and keywords, and then it gives you suggestions and guidelines on relevant keywords to include, number of headlines, and number of images.
Here’s an example I whipped up for this blog post:
Recently, Surfer has launched a suite of new products supported by artificial intelligence and machine learning, including an AI blogging tool that can assist you in writing copy optimized for search.
It’s also great for content planning, with a pretty nifty content outline feature:
Finally, they identify relevant internal links and offer content update suggestions on a weekly basis. Just upload your domain (and optionally, your Google Search Console account), and it gives you suggestions to keep your web pages maintained.
Finally, they also have keyword research and keyword planning features. You just pop in a seed keyword or phrase and it generates a bunch of additional keyword ideas and clusters them using natural language processing.
One of the most powerful AI SEO tools for website owners and SEO professionals.
SEO optimization (I’m aware of the double “optimization”) at its finest.
Price: $69 / month for essential plan when billed annually. Surfer AI writing is pay-as-you-go at $29 per article, and they have other add-ons like SERP analyzer, API, and white label solutions as well.
G2 Score: 4.8/5
2. Jasper
Best for: AI blogging and copywriting, especially for teams.
Jasper is a comprehensive generative AI platform with features for AI image generation, AI copywriting, and more.
I started using Jasper AI in the early days, back when they were just a few team members and their brand was Conversion AI.
They’ve come a long way since then, raising money at over $1B valuation and building a comprehensive suite of products that not only serves SEO use cases, but whole team AI functionalities.
Recently, they launched Brand Voice and product memories, which allow you to analyze and store data about your unique brand style as well as products and services you offer.
This creates a more custom output than many AI writing tools.
Complement that with their abundant SEO templates, including my favorite one (“One Shot Blog Post”), and you’ve got an absolute force multiplier on productivity.
They also have an AI chatbot (that includes up-to-date Google search results, unlike ChatGPT), and they have a Chrome extension so you can beat writer’s block anywhere you go.
Great product and great team.
Price: Starts at $39/mo for the creator account, which includes 1 brand voice and unlimited outputs.
G2 Score: 4.7/5
3. GrowthBar
Best for: AI writing for SEO content creation
GrowthBar is an AI writing tool specifically built for SEOs.
Built by the knowledgeable team at GrowthMarketingPro, it was custom built for organic search use cases, and it includes a ton of features like keyword research, rank tracking, backlink analysis, and SERP analysis, in addition to a powerful AI writing assistant.
They also include the ability to analyze and define a brand voice and use that to generate custom and authentic outputs.
My favorite feature is their on-page SEO audit tool.
Like Surfer, this reverse engineers on-page ranking signals and gives you suggestions to improve every piece of your content, from image count to keywords and even internal and external link suggestions.
This AI SEO tool was custom built for SEOs. They continue to build features and innovate on the core product. Highly recommend checking this one out.
Price: $29 /Month when paid annually for 25 AI articles a month plus SEO features.
G2 Score: 4.8/5
4. Scalenut
Best for: search engine optimization and keyword research at scale
Scalenut is a new AI SEO tool I’ve begun using that has some unique features, particularly for making perfectly optimized content.
First, their keyword clustering feature is world class, and it goes above and beyond big name platforms like Semrush and Ahrefs. It features semantic clustering as well as SERP clustering (based on similarities on pages in search engines) to drive true topic authority, which matters more and more in organic search.
The platform is comprehensive, with content research and planning features, content optimization and update features, and AI powered tools for content writing and editing.
Scalenut is also a great tool for building content briefs at scale.
In my opinion, there will always be a need to build out portions of a content brief manually (else, where’s your competitive advantage?). However, when I’m building out a massive amount of briefs with similar components and content strategy foundations, an AI SEO tool is super useful for speeding up that process.
Solid overall product for SEOs looking to boost search engine rankings and speed up their process.
Price: Starts at $20/mo when paid annually. Includes 7 day free trial
G2 Score: 4.7/5
5. Frase
Best for: SEO strategy, content planning, and content briefs
Frase has grown on me – the darkhorse of the AI SEO tool space.
To start, it’s one of my favorite tools for content strategy, planning, and content research.
It has multiple SEO tools, including content analytics from Google Search Console to identify content weaknesses and opportunities in your organic traffic.
It also includes an outline builder (I’ll cover that in a second), topic planner (which is essentially keyword research to find long tail keywords), and a Wikipedia concept map. They also have an article rewriter, though I don’t find that tool very useful.
One of my favorite tools is the GSC content analytics, because I love content analytics and optimization. Nothing super advanced or technical here; it just gives you a list of SEO and traffic insights based on your rankings and impressions:
As for their content brief tool, it’s world class.
It analyzes the search engine results page for your keyword, does competitor analysis, and gives you headline, subheadline, and content suggestions to make sure your blog post is comprehensive:
I never look at this as a complete research process, but again, it gives you valuable insights in a fraction of the time and gets you to the content creation phase much faster. It’s a great tool to research niche topics and get a quick understanding of the landscape.
They also have an SEO content editor, an AI SEO software much like Clearscope or Surfer that helps you optimize on page SEO towards a score.
Frase also includes an AI copywriting tool to write SEO content, but so does everyone else nowadays 🙂
Price: Starts at just $14.99/mo for their solo plan.
G2 Score: 4.9/5
6. Writesonic
Best for: all purpose AI written content
Writesonic is a grab bag of incredibly useful AI tools, including AI powered SEO tools.
Much like Jasper, they’ve built a comprehensive platform for AI text generation, but have also built features for AI image generation and AI chatbots. They even allow you to create your own AI chatbots trained on your own data.
While they don’t have tools for typical SEO tasks like link building, estimating search volume or keyword difficulty, analyzing internal linking, and conducting competitor analysis, it’s excellent for producing AI generated content.
They’ve got templates for everything:
A few of my top use cases for Writesonic include:
- Generating content ideas
- Producing meta descriptions
- Ideating page titles
- Creating content briefs and content outlines
- Repurposing content for social media marketing
The big thing about Writesonic is it’s much easier to use than other platforms. They literally have a guided template and workflow for pretty much any AI generated content use case you can think of.
Price: Depends on scope and GPT 3 vs GPT 4 (which is only available on the business plan). However, they start with a freemium plan
G2 Score: 4.8/5
7. Keywordinsights.ai
Best for: keyword research and content planning
Keyword Insights is the SEO tool I always wanted to build.
When I worked at HubSpot, I used to built little internal data tools like the Surround Sound SEO tool and a predictive content update tool.
I had ideas on my roadmap to predict search intent and conversion propensity as well as basic clustering algorithms.
Lucky for me, Keyword Insights took the roadmap from my brain and built it into an affordable product.
Now, it’s a core part of my SEO strategy and content research process.
To start, their keyword research tool is a great complement to something like Ahrefs or Semrush. I can seed it with a single short tail keyword and it will spin up thousands of related variants, and then optionally, cluster them by theme.
Recently, they’ve also added the ability to create content briefs and even write content using generative AI.
Essentially, it’s an entire content planning and writing workshop for SEO-focused marketers.
Search engines love topical authority, and Keyword Insights makes your SEO efforts much easier.
You can pay via subscription or by credits, making it one of the most flexible AI SEO tools out there.
Price: Pay by credit or subscribe for $58 /per month
G2 Score: 4.9/5
8. ChatGPT
Best for: everything
I probably don’t have to tell you about ChatGPT.
It’s the ubiquitous AI chatbot released by OpenAI that brought generative AI to the mainstream, even resulting in a South Park episode spoofing the tool.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEk0Tas7xgE
With obvious limitations, it does anything you want it to do:
- Aid in content creation and editing
- Generate blog ideas
- Give you SEO keyword ideas (though without search volume data)
- Conduct competitor analysis and understand an industry or ICP
- Create link building outreach templates
OpenAI built the natural language processing technology that many of the other tools on this list use for their generative AI outputs (GPT-3, and in some cases, GPT-4)
They also launched an Enterprise plan recently with robust security features and the promise of eventually being able to train it on custom data sets.
They continually launch new stuff, like custom instructions.
It’s hard to even summarize ChatGPT, but I probably don’t need to since you’re likely already using it.
If interested, check out my posts on Jasper vs ChatGPT and ChatGPT alternatives.
Price: Free and then premium is like $20 per month (totally worth it to snag GPT-4 and the rest of the add-ons)
G2 Score: 4.7/5
9. Google
Google itself has, of course, developed a myriad of AI SEO tools. They’re updating and releasing more and more everyday, but the main concern for SEOs should be Google SGE, or generative search.
This is still an experiment (as noted in the microcopy here), but it’s essentially an AI generated answer for a search query. This is, in some ways, a progression of existing quick answers and feature snippets. But it’s also much different, in that it summarizes from a variety of sources instead of pulling verbatim from one source.
This is changing and will continue to change search and consumer behavior.
Google Bard is another AI SEO tool important to consider. It’s basically a ChatGPT alternative, an AI chatbot that gives answers to conversational queries:
Google is so steeped in AI at this point that pretty much all of their tools incorporate some elements of AI, including GA4. For example, their anomaly detection in the homepage gives you quick insights on traffic insights:
Price: Free
G2 Score: NA
10. Midjourney
Best for: image generation
Midjourney is my favorite AI art generator by a long shot.
It’s actually a Discord app, making it a little bit of a learning curve for non-nerds.
But the interface is actually wildly simple. Just prompt /imagine and then describe the image you want.
For example, here’s a bunch of muscular chihuahuas who do jiu jitsu in a pencil sketch:
As for the SEO tie-in, well, images are important for readability. Image optimization is important. You don’t want a bunch of lame stock photos.
And you always need a blog header image, yeah? Pop over to my blog category page and realize that almost all my header images are AI generated now:
Price: Free for a set number of images then $8/mo
G2 Score: 4.4/5
11. Castmagic
Best for: podcast repurposing and distribution, including SEO blog posts
Finally, we end on my favorite AI podcasting tool, Castmagic.
Podcasting is a popular component of a modern B2B marketing strategy. Often, it doesn’t fit in well or at all to existing SEO campaigns.
That’s a shame.
I use Castmagic at my agency to make the two efforts synergistic.
Castmagic’s main features revolve around its AI-powered capabilities.
It can extract transcripts, summaries, key topics, and chapter breakdowns from your audio files, which can be invaluable for creating detailed show notes or blog posts1.
Moreover, it identifies meaningful quotes, hooks, and timestamps that can be used to create engaging social media posts or video clips.
This all-in-one title generation and timestamp platform unlocks your show’s full potential by turning every episode into a multitude of content pieces.
Look, if you’re going to spend hours conducting podcast interviews, you might as well get some SEO value and distribution out of it. Castmagic makes that easy.
Price: Starts at $23/mo
G2 Score: 4.9/5
Conclusion
Alright, those are the best AI SEO tools. There are no more AI SEO tools out there. My list is definitive 🙂
I’m kidding, of course. The space is moving fast.
But this list spans many components of building SEO strategies, like:
- Creating high quality content with AI writer tools
- Identify high ranking keywords
- Generate blog ideas at scale
- Scale link building through content gaps and guest posts
- Discover relevant internal links to boost high rankings keywords
Yada yada.
AI tools are great. Hopefully you found one worth trying in my humble listicle.