Surfer AI Review: My Experience

This is a comprehensive Surfer AI review.

In this guide, I'll explore the latest AI writer from Surfer SEO, highlighting the following;

What to expect from one of the most anticipated one-click AI writing tools in the SEO industry.

• Surfer AI's key features
• How to use Surfer AI to write an SEO-optimized article, blog post, and landing page
• Surfer AI pricing
• How Surfer AI compares to other writing assistants

I'll also answer common questions regarding this AI writing tool and give my honest verdict at the tail end of the post.

I will grade Surfer AI write on nine parameters as follows:

• SEO score
• Readability
• Plagiarism
• Word count
• Flow
• AI score
• Ease of use
• Features
• Pricing
  

I will use the tool to write a blog post titled "How to Make Money Blogging on WordPress." That way, I can ensure this Surfer AI review is accurate as possible and hopefully help you replicate the same results with your projects.

Ready to take the plunge? Let's go.

What is Surfer AI?

Surfer AI is an artificial intelligence-powered tool that helps you quickly create ready-to-rank content. It is available as an add-on to Surfer SEO subscribers.

According to Surfer SEO's website, this AI writer doesn't just create articles in a few minutes but also aims to help you generate website traffic by creating well-optimized and high-ranking content.

Surfer AI streamlines the content creation process by handling writing, and optimization, giving you more time to review, refine, and rank your blog posts in search engine results pages (SERPs).

All guidelines this writing tool provides are real-time, competition-based, and Google-compliant.

As a Surfer SEO subscriber, you can leverage features like Audit and Grow Flow to help monitor, manage, and improve your content process and the SERP Analyzer for more in-depth SEO data.

Who is Surfer AI For?

Surfer AI is an ideal writing assistant for a wide range of users involved in content creation, optimization, and marketing. This includes:

• Agencies: Digital marketing agencies can use Surfer AI to fast-track their writing process and generate SEO-optimized content for their clients.
• In-house teams: Companies with in-house content or marketing teams can fine-tune their writing strategy with Surfer AI.
• Individuals: Independent content creators, freelancers, bloggers, and affiliate marketers can leverage Surfer AI to improve SEO optimization and the quality of new and existing content.
• SEO Professionals: Search Engine Optimization specialists can use Surfer AI to identify areas of improvement and, by extension, improve content based on specific SEO strategies.
• Content Strategists: Surfer AI can be a handy tool if you're involved in developing content strategies for clients, such as deciding what type of content to create, when and where to publish it, and how to optimize it for search engines.
• Online Business Owners: Surfer AI can be useful for online retailers and other e-commerce businesses for creating SEO-optimized product descriptions, blog posts, and other content needs.

How to Use Surfer AI to Write Content?

Creating content with Surfer AI generally takes the following steps.

• Feeding your targeted keyword or blog post title into the AI writer. For review, I will use "How to Make Money Blogging on WordPress."
• Selecting your tone based on your target audience. Ideally, you want to choose a tone that best resonates with your readers.
• Allowing Surfer AI to generate the article — the process takes 5 to 10 minutes.
• Edit and optimize content for SEO.
• Publish the content on your website or blog.

Let's get into it.

Step-by-Step Process to Write and Optimize Content with Surfer AI

Step 1 - Feed Your Keyword into Surfer AI

The first thing you want to do is input your chosen keyword in this writing assistant.

In this Surfer AI review, my keyword is "How to Make Money Blogging on WordPress."

The software analyzes top-ranking pages on SERPs and generates all the metrics I need to create the best possible article.

It will also highlight my organic competitors automatically, complete with the content score, authority, and word count.

That way, I have a rough idea of how long my article should be and the SEO score I need to achieve with content optimization to give me the best chance to compete for the top spot in Google.

Step 2 - Adjust and Personalize Your Content

After I hit the "create" button in the first step above, Surfer AI ushers me into the next screen, which allows adjust and personalize my post based on my needs.

The most important thing to note here is the tone at which you want this AI writing tool to generate your content.

You can experiment with various tones, including witty, bold, casual, dramatic, humorous, etc.

The Surfer SEO team recommends the "Auto-SERP based" tone, so I'll leave it that way. The tool will generate content whose style matches top-ranking articles for the exact keyword.

You can, however, adjust the tone depending on your target audience and readers.

Besides setting the tone for your content, you can also activate the Anti-AI detection function. According to Surfer, activating this function may lower the content score and result in a less natural language, so I will leave it inactive. 

I will, however, use AI detection tools to ensure that the content generated by Surfer AI can pass the test.

Remember, while Google isn't against AI-generated content, you want to ensure your blog posts, articles, and any other material you create with Surfer AI are high-quality and valuable for your readers, and they don't sound robotic.

Then, I'll hit the "create outline" button.

Step 3 - Create and Review the Outline

It took Surfer AI around 6 minutes to generate the outline for my target keyword. The outline builder is designed to help you structure your content outline with potential headings and questions.

I like that it breaks the headlines into H1s, H2s, H3s, and so on.

The content structure was pretty solid and comprehensive enough to enable me to generate SEO content covering all my blog post's essential areas.

I suggest going through the headings and subheadings to ensure they flow well. In my case, I had to rewrite some of the titles to make them sound better.

After you're done with the outline, it's time to hit the "Let's Write" button.

Step 4 - Writing and Optimizing Content

It took about 10 minutes for Surfer AI to generate this post. And with a word count of 3,677, that's pretty good.

The SEO score was quite good — it was 72 for this keyword.

Articles ranking in SERPs for this keyword averaged 69, so this wasn't that bad at all.

The next step is content optimization. I recommend optimizing your content to at least 80 for every blog post, landing page, or article you generate with Surfer AI or any other SEO writing tool. Of course, you can optimize it further depending on the average content score for top websites.

You'll want to ensure the article reads well, so use a tool like Grammarly to check for grammatical and spelling mistakes.

How Good is Surfer AI?

As you can see, creating content with this AI writing tool is easy and reasonably fast. But how good is the content generated by Surfer AI? Here is my unbiased analysis.

1. SEO Score

As I mentioned, the article generated by Surfer AI had an SEO score of 72. The competitor with the highest SEO score had a 78. That's a difference of 6 points.

It took me about 30 minutes to optimize the content and attain an SEO score of 80, the highest for this keyword.

So, when it comes to the ability of Surfer AI to produce SEO-optimized content, I'll give it an 8.

Note that the score may vary from keyword to keyword, but overall, I was pretty decent.

2. Readability

Generating readable content is crucial if you want people to read your blog posts. Readability also helps drive organic traffic to your website. The higher the readability score, the better.

When I plugged in content created by Surfer AI into Grammarly, it had a readability score of 42. While this isn't high enough, Grammarly indicates that it is likely to be understood by a reader with at least a 10th-grade education or age 16.

On Hemingway Editor, the content has a score of 13. According to Hemingway App, this text is hard to read. I tried to achieve a readability score of 9 using the recommendations. 

Regarding generating readable content, I will give Surfer AI a 7. You can, however, use Grammarly to improve your score.

You can, for instance, use the clarity, correctness, engagement, and delivery function integrated into Grammarly to make the text more readable.

3. Plagiarism

Avoiding plagiarism is one of the best practices to protect your site's ranking. Plus, it's illegal to copy other people's work and ideas.

Surfer SEO comes with an integrated plagiarism check which I used to check the copy's originality.

The content passed the plagiarism test when I used Surfer's plagiarism tool.

I also checked for plagiarism using Grammarly, which showed 14% of the content was plagiarized.

A closer look, however, reveals that most of the "plagiarized" sections were phrased from Google Books and not from any blog post about how to make money blogging on WordPress. And that's something I can quickly fix.

The content also passed CopyScape, with 0% plagiarism detected.

For this, I give Surfer AI a 9 when it comes to plagiarism detection.

4. Word Count

While word count is not a direct Google ranking factor, a reasonably long blog post helps the search engine understand your text.

You don't have to worry about word count with Surfer AI.

This AI writing tool can automatically detect how long your article should be and correctly adjust the length.

Surfer SEO suggests the post should be between 3,600 and 4,010 for my target keyword.

Surfer generated 3672 words, ensuring that my article's length was within the recommended range.

Based on my experience with Surfer SEO, the tool is on point when it comes to word count suggestions, so I'll give the AI writer a 10 for this.

5. Flow

Content flow is crucial for writing long-form content like blog posts or articles. Readers want relevant and proper content with a simple flow, so they can understand it along with a sense of satisfaction.

Surfer AI's content flow is reasonable. I had to edit and rewrite sentences to improve the flow.

Again, this isn't much work, especially if you don't outsource editing for your articles. And even if you do it, picking an off-sounding sentence or paragraph is easy. Besides, you can use Grammarly to address clarity issues and, by extension, improve the flow.

According to Grammarly, the article I created with Surfer AI is "mostly clear" with 63 issues, so the writing software gets a 7 for the flow.

6. AI Score

While one-click AI writing tools make it easy and faster to generate content, you want to ensure what you write passes AI detection.

As I mentioned, you can activate AI detection at the initial stage of using Surfer AI, but I choose to leave it off. That way, I can see how the content generated by this AI writer performs when I plug it into tools like Origanility.AI and Content at Scale.

The content achieved a 99% score for originality with Content at Scale. For this, I will Surfer AI 9.

7. Ease of Use and Content Structure

Surfer AI is straightforward to use.

The interface is user-friendly, with the functions cleverly placed. You only need to be patient with the writing tool to create the outline and generate the article for your target keyword.

You can tell what to expect at a glance by analyzing the outline generated by Surfer AI. I especially like the short summary at the top of the article detailing the content of the entire piece in a few lines.

That said, using Surfer AI is as easy as it is, and the content structure is solid.

8. Features

Surfer AI has four main features that allow you to do the following:

• Feed your keyword into the writing software
• Adjust, optimize, and boost AI detection for your content
• Review the output
• Generate your article in one click

These are all features you need to create your long-form content. The best part is that the software is integrated will all the other functions of Surfer's SEO tools.

That way, you can optimize your SEO content and, most importantly, compare it to your competitors. You can also check for plagiarism.

During the premiere, the Surfer SEO team promised to launch more exciting features in the coming days, so look out for that.

Surfer AI Pricing

First, you must be a Surfer SEO subscriber to use Surfer AI. You can go to the pricing section of my in-depth Surfer SEO review to learn more. But to give you a quick heads-up, the lowest Surfer SEO tier is available for $19 billed annually.

Surfer AI pricing is structured as follows:

• $29 for one credit or one article
• $145 for 5 credits plus 2 free ones
• $290 for 10 credits plus 5 free ones
• $725 for 25 credits 15 free ones

These are introductory prices, and I suppose Surfer SEO will scrap the free credits with time.

Sign Up for Surfer AI now to take advantage of the free credits.

One issue that is becoming apparent with Surfer AI is that some users think the pricing is quite steep compared to other AI writing tools.

On the flip side, Surfer AI is a Surfer SEO add-on, which means you can now generate an AI article and optimize it within the same application, saving you the hassle of going back and forth between a writing and keyword research tool.

Previously, you had to create the article with an AI assistant like ZimmWriter and copy-paste it into Surfer SEO to optimize it. Now, you have everything in one place.

Surfer AI Pros and Cons

Here are some upsides and downsides of this AI writing tool.

Pros 

• You can generate highly SEO-optimized content with just a few clicks
• You can create long-quality content for search engines based on top-ranking websites 
• You can leverage Surfer AI to generate long-form content between 3,000 to 4,000 based on the competition 
• The tool creates excellent content for generic topics
• Surfer AI creates content that can pass AI detection 
• The AI writer comes with a free integrated plagiarism checker and access to other Surfer SEO features 

Cons

• You have to be an active Surfer SEO subscriber 
• You can't go back to the previous wizard to make some edits before creating our article. So, make sure you've verified everything before going to the next step.
• You must make some edits to fine-tune your article. You might need to do some heavy rounds of editing for more technical subjects, but that's standard with almost every AI writing tool.
• Surfer AI is best suited for long-form content. If you want to create compelling short-form content like landing pages, emails, and social media posts, you may have to opt for other AI writer tools like Copy.ai.

Surfer AI Alternatives

Surfer AI is a robust, easy-to-use AI writer for creating SEO-optimized content. It seamlessly integrates with Surfer SEO to give you more functionalizes.

Notable Surfer AI alternatives include:

• Content at Scale
• Jasper AI
• Zimmwriter

And if you're looking for good short-form content AI writers, you can try the following picks.

• Copy AI
• Writesonic
• Rytr

Remember, as a rule of thumb, fact-check every piece of content you generate using AI writing tools before posting to your website or blog.

Surfer AI Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

What is Surfer AI?

Surfer AI is an AI-powered writing tool designed to streamline content creation and optimization.

It generates SEO-optimized articles, provides real-time SEO suggestions, and allows tone and content structure customization.

With features like one-click content and anti-AI detection, Surfer AI aims to simplify content creation, saving time and enhancing overall quality.

How Many Words Can You Generate with Surfer AI?

Surfer AI doesn't have a specific word limit for content generation.

It can write extensive articles; for instance, you can use it to create a blog post of about 3,073 words, fitting within a recommended range of 3,000-3,450 words for long-form content.

I used the tool to create a 3,672 words long blog post in the example above.

Is Surfer AI Good for Beginners?

Surfer AI is user-friendly and efficient, even for beginners.

The platform has an intuitive content editor that color-codes keyword usage according to SEO suggestions and provides a score indicating how well the writing aligns with optimization recommendations. This feature can be helpful for beginners who are still learning about SEO and content optimization.

Still, Surfer AI content may require post-writing editing to enhance quality and ensure uniqueness. Plus, it's currently limited to English and Spanish content creation.

While beginners could benefit from the tool, there might be a learning curve, like with any new writing software.

Can I use Surfer AI with Jasper AI?

Yes, you can use Surfer AI with Jasper AI.

The goal is to increase the writing capacity and deliver more optimized content. Surfer AI guides you on topics, structure, and relevant keywords, while Jasper AI helps to generate unique, engaging, and entertaining content.

You can use the Surfer Content Editor inside the Jasper AI text editor to create quality content effortlessly, using Surfer's guidelines with content written by Jasper. However, you need an active Surfer subscription and a Jasper AI Pro account to use this integration.

Surfer AI Review - My Verdict

Surfer AI is a good AI writing tool for those looking to streamline the content creation process and enhance their SEO strategy.

It has impressive features, from SEO to copywriting and anti-AI detection, making content generation more efficient and effective.

In addition, the tool's ability to integrate with platforms such as WordPress and Jasper AI further elevates its utility.

Despite some limitations, such as the need for post-writing editing and its restriction to English and Spanish content, Surfer AI may be a game-changer for digital marketers, affiliates, bloggers, and agencies because it streamlines the content creation process.

Surfer AI offers a solution that can save you significant time and effort, allowing you to focus more on your creative process and less on the technicalities of SEO.

Do I recommend Surfer AI?

Yes, I do.

It's a worthy investment if you're scouting for an AI writing assistant to help amp up your content production and website traffic.