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SEO

min read

January 2, 2024

4 Best AI SEO Tools

Keelyn Hart

Content Writer at Letterdrop

TL;DR:

Letterdrop is a human-centric SEO tool that focuses on valuable content and integrates with content management platforms.
Surfer SEO offers keyword research, content editing, and data-driven insights, but lacks in SEO automation capabilities.
Jasper AI is primarily for content creation and lacks built-in SEO insights.
Frase provides AI writing and content generation features, but lacks AI-powered technical and structural fixes.

The SEO community has completely embraced AI-powered SEO tools, and it comes as no surprise. The SEO landscape is completely changing with AI — just look at how Google has adopted AI for its SGE.

Almost all content is assisted by AI these days, and you need to keep up if you want to stay competitive. But you can't just go for any AI-driven SEO platform. Certain tools encourage old tactics like keyword stuffing that just won't get you ranking.

Here's how four different tools are incorporating AI for SEO today — some in really smart ways that will help you adapt to the changing search climate, and others in outdated ways that can leave you in your competitors' dust.

1. Letterdrop

Letterdrop was founded by ex-Googlers in 2021 and is the only SEO tool that's human-centric, focusing on real information instead of just keywords.

Who is Letterdrop Best For?

Content teams:

at B2B companies
that want to focus on creating valuable human-centric content
that want to drive conversions, not just traffic
that want to stay on top of Google's changes with SGE
want a tool that plugins into the rest of their workflows - project management, publishing, and distribution

The tooling is consistently updated to reflect changes in the search climate, including making sure you optimize for Google's SGE and Perspectives. Search is becoming smarter with AI, and keyword stuffing is a thing of the past — Letterdrop puts the user's search journey first.

It also integrates these SEO tools with an end-to-end content management platform, so you have all your content ops in one place. It's a headless CMS that works with Webflow, WordPress, HubSpot, and custom sites.

Letterdrop's Unique Offerings

Here's everything that Letterdrop can uniquely offer you in terms of AI-assisted SEO:

1. Semantic Content Analysis: The AI helps you understand search intent, the right format to answer it, and also evaluates your content against Search Rater Guidelines.

Letterdrop helps answer search intent and EEAT

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2. Automatic Technical SEO Fixes: Letterdrop runs your content through over 60 SEO best practices and can auto-fix most of them. Eliminate keyword stuffing, broken links, and rewrite headings.

Auto-fix technical SEO errors with Letterdrop

3. Content Gap Analysis and Automatic Fixes: Letterdrop provides insights into what talking points have been covered on the SERP already and lets you auto-generate similar sections with AI. It also suggests new topics that haven't been covered by others to optimize for Information Gain and rank higher.

Letterdrop helps you cover important topics and helps offer net new information to rank higher — Letterdrop helps you make sure you're covering the right topics and helps you rank with new information

4. Automatic Site-Wide SEO Fixes and Checks: Letterdrop uses AI to identify and automatically add internal links across your site. It also offers real-time page refresh insights after analyzing data from Google Search Console and Google Analytics.

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5. AI-Assisted Writing with Frameworks can help you generate full-fledged introductions, sections, and conclusions based on business writing frameworks like PASO, TAS, and BLUF.

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2. Surfer SEO

Founded in 2017, Surfer is a popular content optimization and SEO tool among marketers and makes suggestions based on Google Search Console data. Functioning as a content intelligence tool, it streamlines the SEO content workflow by offering keyword research, an AI outline builder, content editing, and data-driven SEO insights.

Who is SurferSEO Best For?

Individuals and freelancers looking for a single tool to match keywords from top pages and generate first drafts with AI.

SurferSEO's Unique Offerings

Surfer allows you to tweak your specific SEO goals for the piece and assigns you a score on how well you're meeting these goals. For example, you can adjust:

the competitors you want to be evaluated against
structural goals
topical goals by selecting the most relevant "People Also Ask" topics

Surfer's SEO Audit tool and content scores focus on keyword frequency and content length. These are not ranking factors and certainly don't help you help your reader. Surfer can alert you to technical fixes you need on your site in their automated reports, but it can't do anything to take these tasks off your hands.

3. Jasper AI

Jasper is a generative AI platform that was launched in 2021. While primarily for content creation, content writers use the AI assistant to help write blog posts for SEO. It can also integrate with Surfer SEO for a more rounded approach, but for the sake of this article, we'll look at what the tool can do on its own.

Who is Jasper Best For?

Individuals and freelancers looking to use AI to scale their output in a chat interface similar to ChatGPT.

Using the JasperAI chatbot to help classify keywords

Without its Surfer integration, Jasper has no real built-in SEO insights. It's a more advanced version of ChatGPT with templates built-in. You can ask it for meta descriptions and to insert keywords into your text, but it doesn't use data from the SERP for your target keyword.

Jasper's Unique Offerings

Jasper is available as a Chrome extension and a chat, making it accessible and easy to use everywhere.

4. Frase

Frase was founded in 2017 and is a content writing assistant that offers AI writing, content generation, and article optimization features. It helps save writing time by helping you research topics, generate content outlines, and use AI to write content.

Who is Frase Best For?

Small content teams and freelancers looking for a tool to close keyword gaps.

Frase's Unique Offerings

When it comes to keyword suggestions, Frase has a more rounded approach than most other tools that simply encourage keyword stuffing for the sake of it.

The Optimize tool shows you which keywords you're missing from top pages, offers you more context for these suggestions, and can auto-generate these into your writing.

Frase completely lacks any AI-powered technical or structural fixes, which leaves you on the back foot in terms of SEO. While it pulls out topics, it doesn't present actual information or talking points.

A Side By Side Comparison of Letterdrop, Surfer, Jasper, and Frase

All of these above tools have their merit. But I was interested in them from the perspective of whether they use their AI to streamline mundane tasks and adapt to the shifts in the search climate.

Everyone can use AI to spit out a seemingly-impressive article filled with keywords, but are the AI-powered SEO suggestions going to actually get you ranking today?

With this in mind, I evaluated the above tools and assigned each tool a grade according to this system:

Absent — The tool completely lacks this feature.
Basic — The tool meets basic requirements.
Average — The tool meets requirements satisfactorily.
Robust — The tool exceeds requirements.

	Letterdrop	Surfer SEO	Jasper AI	Frase
Keyword Research	Average. Includes Search Volume, SEO Difficulty, Paid Difficulty, CPC, and Current Trend. Pulls data from Semrush.	Basic. Includes Search Volume and Keyword Difficulty.	Absent. Only has this feature if you connect it to Surfer SEO.	Basic. Integrates with Google Search Console so you can see CTR and position.
SEO-Friendly AI-Assistive Writing	Average. Can auto-generate keyword-friendly introductions, sections, and conclusions based on writing frameworks.	Average: Auto-generates articles based on your chosen keyword and custom rules related to competitors and desired structure.	Robust. Central focus is on intelligent AI writing. Can naturally insert keywords into text.	Basic. Can auto-write blog introductions and metaphor analogies.
Top Page Comparison	Average. Shows keyword frequency and heading suggestions based on top pages. You can auto-add these terms and headings.	Basic. Keyword Surfer lets you see word count, keyword frequency, and keyword ideas from competitors.	Absent. Only has this feature if you connect it to Surfer SEO.	Basic. Shows keyword ideas from top pages and scores you according to keyword frequency.
Answering Search Intent	Robust. "Search Intent" feature identifies search intent type, appropriate format, and conversion likelihood.	Basic. Has a basic filter for search intent in Keyword Research.	Basic. You can ask Jasper to classify you keywords into search intent types.	Absent. No tooling for identifying search intent.
Topical Optimization	Robust. Uses semantic understanding of topics to suggest and auto-add Tablestakes topics and Information Gain opportunities based on top results. Performs an EEAT analysis.	Basic. Relies on keyword relevance only. Extracts topic ideas in Grow Flow based on trend. Organizes topics based on topic clusters. No automatic fixes.	Absent. Only has this feature if you connect it to Surfer SEO.	Basic. You can sort contextual information on keywords (such as top topics and more) and can auto-add them.
Technical Optimization	Robust. Can identify and auto-fix numerous technical SEO errors, including internal links, missing alt text, missing TL;DR, and more.	Basic. Audit tool can identify missing links, page speed issues, keyword density issues, and more. No automatic fixes.	Absent. Only has this feature if you connect it to Surfer SEO.	Absent. No support for technical suggestions.
Content Refresh Monitoring	Robust. Integrates with Google Search Console to provide real-time alerts to pages that are almost ranking, are being cannabalized, and more so you can make improvements.	Basic. General reports on improvements you can make to rank better. No automatic fixes.	Absent. Only has this feature if you connect it to Surfer SEO.

Choosing The Right SEO Tool

When these tools are put side-by-side, it's pretty clear that most of them are lacking in the search intent and topical optimization departments. Frase and Surfer give you scores according to how many times you use keywords, which just encourages keyword stuffing.

Giving an arbitrary score on how often you repeated a keyword or whether or not you're achieving the same word count as top pages is not enough to get you ranking today. It certainly doesn't help you close any genuine content gaps.

Keyword stuffing won't get you ranking in the modern search climate where Google has a very clear people-first approach
The search engine's PaLM2 is smart enough to semantically understand pages

And as for Jasper, it's a great tool for AI writing, but it's not built for SEO and shouldn't really be used as an SEO tool.

You need to consider tools that use AI to put a user's search journey front of mind. As we've shown earlier on, Letterdrop takes these factors, search intent, and more into consideration when analyzing content. That's because the team is actively thinking about the future of SEO and adapting accordingly. The platform, like its creators, prioritizes users over search engines — which you need to consider when choosing your SEO assistant.

Your SEO AI Tool Should Be Helping Answer Search Intent Above All

Unfortunately, tools like Frase and Surfer are falling behind when it comes to tackling SEO. Search is more topical and you need your SEO companion to help you bring the user's search journey to an end with its automation capabilities.

If you're looking to get ranking in the changing search climate in 2024, reach out to us.