Frase Review: Briefs, Drafts and Limits

Frase is worth a trial if you write SERP-driven articles and want SEO and AI-search scores in the same tool. It's a weaker buy if you expect publish-ready drafts or a full keyword database. Plans cost $39, $103 or $239 per month on yearly billing, which works out to about $2.39 to $3.90 per article at the included limits.

This review covers what Frase does today, what each plan buys, where reviewers say it falls short and how to test it inside the 7-day trial. We haven't run a paid Frase account for this review, so it's clear where the facts come from: every number comes from Frase's own pricing page and homepage (read on 25 October 2026) and every opinion on output quality is labelled as what other reviewers report.

Is Frase worth it?

Frase is worth it if your main bottleneck is SERP research, briefs and on-page optimization for articles, and you want AI-search visibility tracking from the same subscription. It isn't worth it if you need ready-to-publish copy without editing, or a keyword database with volume and difficulty scores. Frase's own feature list names research that ends in a brief and topic clusters, not a keyword database, and it's telling that three of the four other reviews we read call the AI drafts generic.

Frase fits three kinds of reader, and they're easy to spot.

• Content teams that build articles from the SERP get the most out of it, because the research-to-brief workflow is the part every reviewer praises.
• Teams that want SEO and AI-search scores together benefit, since every plan includes SEO and GEO scores and AI Visibility tracking.
• Agencies with several sites can use Scale, which covers 10 domains and 5 seats.

It fits three other kinds of reader less well.

• Writers who want finished copy will be disappointed, because reviewers report that drafts need heavy editing.
• Teams that need a full SEO suite should look elsewhere, since Frase doesn't replace a rank tracker or a keyword database, so you'd pair it with one, and that's an extra cost.
• Anyone who needs a refund promise in writing should ask first, because the pricing page we read shows no money-back guarantee.

What is Frase and what does it do now?

Frase is a content platform that researches the SERP, builds a brief, drafts and scores an article for Google and AI search, tracks where AI engines cite you and watches published pages for ranking decay. Frase calls itself "the content operating system for AI search", which is a long way from the 2024 writer's assistant that older reviews still describe.

The table lists the features by the names Frase uses on its own site.

Two details stand out. First, the agent has an autonomy setting per content type (manual, review-only or automatic), so you decide what it's allowed to publish without you. Second, MCP, CLI and API access come with every plan, with request limits of 5,000, 20,000 and 50,000 per month on Starter, Professional and Scale. Our guide to AI SEO agents explains why that approval setting matters.

Frase also offers free tools that don't need a subscription: a GEO Score Checker, an AI Visibility Checker and an Agent Readiness Checker.

How much does Frase cost?

Frase costs $39, $103 or $239 per month on yearly billing for Starter, Professional and Scale, or $49, $129 and $299 per month when you pay monthly, with 10, 40 and 100 articles per month included. Enterprise has custom pricing. Prices below are in USD and weren't converted; they were checked on 25 October 2026 on the Frase pricing page.

The cost per article column is our arithmetic: plan price divided by the monthly article limit. It assumes you use every article slot and ignores audit pages and AI generations, so it's the floor, not the average. Of course, you won't always fill every slot.

The plan page adds five details worth knowing.

• The trial is free for 7 days: Frase offers a free 7-day trial with no credit card on Starter, Professional and Scale. The trial gives you Professional's feature set, so you can't test Starter's smaller one, capped at 5 articles, 50 audit pages, 25 AI prompts and up to 3 seats.
• Overage works differently by plan: Starter stops at its monthly limits. Professional and Scale can switch on optional pay-as-you-go billing, which is off by default: $5 per extra article, $0.50 per audit page and $0.25 per AI prompt on Professional, and $4, $0.40 and $0.20 on Scale.
• Seats are priced separately: extra seats cost $29 per month. The Scale card says the same, but the comparison table says extra seats are included, so ask before you count on it, because the page doesn't settle it.
• History depends on the plan: Starter shows current data only, Professional keeps 3 months, Scale 12 months and Enterprise 24 months.
• The break-even between Professional and Scale is easy to calculate: on yearly prices, Scale costs $136 more than Professional. At $5 per extra article, that gap equals about 27 articles, so above roughly 67 articles a month Scale is cheaper than Professional plus overage.

Frase also sells FraseCMS hosting separately, from a free tier up to $99 per month. We leave it out of the comparison because most readers publish to WordPress or another CMS, and it isn't part of the plan limits.

Why do other Frase reviews show different prices?

Other Frase reviews show different prices because Frase changed plan names, units and prices between 2024 and 2026, and some review pages weren't updated. Here's what we found when we compared them.

Units differ too. eesel counts "content projects" (15, 75 and 75), while the current page counts articles (10, 40 and 100). The 2024 page also describes a $1 paid trial, whereas the current page offers 7 days free without a card, which shows how far the offer has moved.

AI Visibility is the other point of disagreement. eesel lists AI search tracking as an optional add-on on the lower plans, while the current pricing page lists AI Visibility on every plan, with more engines on higher plans. When two reviews disagree, trust the vendor page and its date. It's the only source that can't be out of date on the day you read it.

Where is Frase strong?

Frase is strongest at turning a keyword into a SERP-based brief, scoring a draft for Google and for AI search, and tracking AI citations from the same plan. The four areas below are where its own pages and the other reviewers line up.

Research and briefs

Frase's research ends in a brief, and every review we read names this as its best feature. HyperWrite reports that the brief builder analyzes the top 10 ranking pages and groups People Also Ask questions. Older reviews describe the same flow as a research panel feeding an outline creator, so the core idea hasn't changed even as the product around it did. If you already build briefs by hand from the SERP, this is the step Frase shortens.

SEO and GEO scores

Each page gets an SEO score for Google and a GEO score for being cited by AI engines. Treat the scores as a checklist, not a verdict. HyperWrite says keyword density and NLP scoring are shallower than Surfer's, and a higher score doesn't guarantee a ranking, and Frase itself says it won't promise a ranking or a citation during the trial.

AI Visibility

AI Visibility tracks your share of voice in AI answers every day and alerts you when it moves. Which engines you get, how many prompts you can track and how many pages Content Guard watches all depend on the plan.

If you track AI answers seriously, 20 prompts on Starter is a small sample, because each prompt is one question you want to appear in and you'll burn through them quickly. Our AI visibility guide explains how to pick prompts worth tracking.

Content Guard, publishing and MCP

Content Guard watches published pages for ranking decay and drafts a fix that you approve. Publishing goes straight to WordPress, Webflow, Sanity or Wix, and the MCP server lets an assistant such as Claude or Cursor run Frase tasks. HyperWrite lists the MCP audit workflow among the pros, and it's a feature the older reviews couldn't mention.

Where does Frase fall short?

Frase falls short in a few places: reviewers report generic AI drafts, fabricated citations and caps that fill up fast, and the public ratings are split rather than uniformly good. These points come from other reviewers, not from our own testing, and we haven't seen the same problems ourselves.

• Generic drafts. eesel, Top10SEOSoftware and HyperWrite all say the AI writer produces generic text that needs editing.
• Fabricated citations. HyperWrite's reviewers report that the writer can hallucinate or invent sources, so don't publish a draft until you've checked every citation.
• Caps. Starter's 10 articles and Professional's 40 run out quickly for a team that's publishing daily.
• Shallow keyword scoring. HyperWrite compares the scoring unfavorably with Surfer's.
• Public web only. eesel notes that research draws on public web data, not internal sources such as a help center.
• Refunds. The pricing page we read shows no money-back guarantee, and eesel says that some Trustpilot users describe refund problems. Get any refund promise in writing before you pay for a year.

Ratings tell a split story. Here's what we could check.

The Trustpilot split matters more than the average: almost nobody's in the middle, and Trustpilot notes that Frase hasn't recently asked customers for reviews. Use the vendor's G2 and Capterra claim as a lead to check, not as proof, because it's the vendor grading itself.

How does Frase compare with Surfer, Clearscope and Semrush?

Frase has the lowest entry price of the four tools below and counts articles, while Surfer and Clearscope sell optimization documents and Semrush sells a full SEO suite. Prices are each vendor's entry plan with AI search tracking where the page lists it, read on 25 October 2026. Frase, Surfer and Clearscope are in US dollars, while the Semrush page showed euros, so don't compare that row directly.

Pick by the job. Frase clearly suits teams that want research, drafting, scoring and AI tracking in one plan. Surfer and Clearscope concentrate on scoring and optimizing individual documents, and Semrush adds the keyword and site data that Frase lacks. Our guides to Surfer SEO, Surfer pricing, Clearscope alternatives, Semrush pricing and Frase alternatives go deeper, and our roundup of content optimization tools lists more options.

Which Frase plan fits you, and how do you test it in the 7-day trial?

Start the 7-day trial, run it on pages you already know, and pick the plan from your real monthly article count rather than from the feature list. The trial is capped at 5 articles, 50 audit pages, 25 AI prompts and 3 seats, so plan the week before you start.

A test plan that fits inside the trial caps:

1. Day 1: audit. Connect one site and run the audit on up to 50 pages. Compare the findings with your own crawl and note what Frase missed or got wrong.
2. Day 2: brief. Generate a brief for a keyword where you already rank between positions 4 and 10. Check the headings against the real top 10 yourself.
3. Day 3: draft. Create one draft with the agent. Count every factual claim and source, and verify each one, because reviewers report invented citations.
4. Day 4: score. Open an existing article, apply the suggestions and see whether the SEO and GEO scores move. Ask whether you'd have made those edits anyway.
5. Day 5: AI Visibility. Use your 25 trial prompts on questions your buyers ask. Compare the results with what you see by hand in ChatGPT and Google.
6. Day 6: MCP. Connect Frase to your assistant and run one audit workflow, to see whether the connector saves you time.
7. Day 7: decide. Count the articles you'd publish per month. Under 10, Starter is enough; between 10 and 40, Professional; between 40 and roughly 67, still Professional with overage if you're comfortable with the $5 rate; above that, Scale. If the test didn't change how you work, don't pay.

Frequently asked questions