Handy right?

Better still, when you use ChatGPT like this for writing, you remove the need for ‘humanizing’ content on the back end, which let’s be honest, is just editing something awful into something semi-readable that your audience won’t immediately bounce away from.

I don’t know about you, but for me, the humanizing edits are the worst part of writing with AI.

Why?

Well, a lot of people seem to think that humanizing is simply making it sound less robotic, in terms of phrasing and sentences. But really, it’s about fixing core things that make or break the article.

Such as:

• The structure is off and talks about things out of order
• Some of the sentences doesn’t make sense in relation to the article or are repetitive
• It covers too many things on a topic, stuffing it with every little thing about a subject
• But then it has hardly any detail about the things that you want to learn about

It sucks right?

And so what would happen is that I would edit it for hours only to just delete the whole thing and then rewrite it from scratch, because it was faster and easier than editing something awful.

But nowadays I use ChatGPT as a writing assistant instead. So rather than have it write something and me edit after the fact, I guide it through the entire writing process, so that I’m writing alongside it.

That way I’m still the creative ‘brains’ behind the post but the tool helps me get my work done faster.

It’s slightly more effort on the front end compared to ‘one-click’ AI drafts, but it actually saves far more time on the backend, while also producing far higher quality.

For example

A 5,000 word article that used to take me 5-8 hours manually, now takes me around 90 minutes. That’s around 210 hours a year saved.

Even better? With the right prompts, you can also get it fully ‘publish ready’.

• I have ChatGPT run through a sweep of copywriting tweaks to make it connect with the reader better
• As well as perform onpage SEO and write meta titles and meta descriptions.
• Then I simply copy and paste it into WordPress.

It’s basically taking the manual writing approach that I’ve used professionally for the last 11 years of writing online, and then using the AI to handle the heavy lifting parts to make my life easier.

I feed it my process and then work through it together. It’s still me writing content, but I get it to help me research, organize ideas, get context and feedback, look at what the top posts are, understand intent around searches, help plan the outline and more!

And that’s all before we even start writing, and done in 5 minutes.

The writing part also follows the same structure, plot beats, and context and conversational flow that I would do manually, but it’s much faster. I tell it what to include or not, add tweaks and edits, and guide it to produce MY OUTPUT but faster and without the tool being the brains of the operation.

Not bad for just $20 a month eh?

As for output and usage limits, there’s no set cap on how much content you can create either.

What I mean by that, is that every other tool on this list allows you to write X posts per month, and that’s it. (The next tool on the list is capped at 15 articles for $49 a month).

You can write more but only if you pay more for a higher membership.

But with ChatGPT 4.0, you’re only limited by how much you can use it each day before you get a usage cap alert. Even then it’s more of a soft warning, and just stops you using it for an hour.

I’ve only ever had this issue twice in the past few years, usually when I’m doing a 12 hour sprint and using it non stop. In reality you can use it for 8-10 hours every day, with no issue.

Tl;DR

This tool is perfect for content marketers who want to keep their tone of voice and produce higher quality content, and don’t want to offload their entire writing process to AI.

• If used properly, you’re the one doing the creative aspect – rather than editing something awful
• It’s cheap to use, easy to learn, and has no real output limit. Write for yourself, for clients, and more, all for just $20 a month
• It can even do one click drafts that are high quality if you prefer, as long as you prompt it well, but I highly recommend you watch the video above and learn to use it properly

It’s not perfect and can make mistakes, but less often than you would think. You can also build systems into your prompts to deal with this. SImply ask it to check everything is up to date and correct and give you sources to double check it yourself also.

Easy!

It does miss some of the other additional features that other tools on this list have, but with the right prompts you can get it to do the same if you want.

For example

I always feed it the top posts on the list to analyze search intent and topic structure, before giving it my own ideas. It then pulls these all together and helps me structure the outline of the draft sections before we start.

No joke but almost every feature the other tools offer, can be done with this to some extent – if you know what you’re doing.

Like I say, this is my tool of choice, but let’s break down the others.

Option #2. Frase.io

Price:

• Pay-As-You-Go: $3.50 per article (Using the team level feature set)
• Basic Plan: $45/month (30 articles/month, Frase editor only)
• Team Plan: $115/month (unlimited articles, Google Docs/WordPress integration, multi-user access, etc)
• Enterprise: Custom pricing available. All the features so far as well as the ability to plug in other backend LLM’s via API

Best for: Writers and marketers who want to research real search intent, plan better SEO content outlines, and guide AI writing more strategically.

The really cool thing about Frase is that it isn’t an AI writing production factory like GravityWrite, nor is it a suite of tools – and that’s a good thing! Instead, Frase is entirely focused on content creation and simplifying the writing process for SEO focused content marketers.

You start by entering a target keyword, and Frase scans the top results to pull out:

• Common headings
• Subtopics
• Questions people ask
• Key stats or examples

However, the key difference with this tool is you can dive deeper into each suggestion by researching competing content right there in the UI.

Here you can see that someone is writing an article on “What is SEO”, and it shows the top result from SearchEngineLand, as well as the meta description and the headlines for that particular post.

Then you can click on any of those subheads and read the sections of that competitor’s article right there in your UI. This helps you to see what they’re talking about and helps you decide if you think you should also include a section on this.

Then it’s as simple as clicking on it to have this section topic added to your own outline. (Just the topic – not actually copying the whole section).

You can do this for each competitor in the top 10 and pull ideas from all of them to create the best version, as well as add your own ideas that the others might have missed.

Then you can simply drag and drop that outline and rearrange, before confirming the finished outline and having the tool write the draft for you.

Handy right?

A lot of great content comes from understanding the audience’s needs and structuring it correctly before you start writing. One of the main struggles of beginner writers is they don’t do this, and so go off topic or not covering important information. It’s the same with AI tools. The better the outline, the less chance of repetition and bloat, so this is super helpful.

Once you’ve got the draft, you can then edit it inside the UI, and ask the tool to make other changes also via prompts.

My only issue with this is there seems to be some kind of backend core prompt in the tool perhaps? And so sometimes when I ask it to do a specific thing, it doesn’t always do what I want.

That’s fine because the AI will never be perfect, and we’ll always need some human tweaks. It’s just sometimes it understands and other times it really struggles to be anywhere near what I want, so I’ll edit it manually.

Once you’re done with the draft, you can also ask Frase to scan and add internal links to other pages on your site. Again, like with other tools this is kind of hit and miss. I’ll normally run it and then see what makes sense to keep.

Finally, Frase also has 3 other features that are handy for content marketers:

• Content brief creation
• Content analysis
• And content audits

Content brief creation

If you use external writers and want to make sure they cover all the topics, you can build your outline and then send it to them so they cover everything.

Content analysis

This feature is great for doing content updates on old posts.

You upload your current article or give it the URL, and then it scans and compares it to the top posts – similar to what it does when you enter a keyword idea. Only this time, it’s telling you what your post has or is missing in relation to those other articles.

I’ll be honest, it still needs human interaction. You should always double check what it’s recommending and not accept it blindly, but it does give you a rough idea of what to look for and see if you should include or not.

Fortunately though, you can simply click on the recommendations and then see what the other content is saying, so you can see if it’s worth also adding.

Content audits

This final tool is super handy for helping you get more traffic. Basically, it will scan your entire site, and then look at the current position and rankings of your articles, and make recommendations on each post.

It separates the recommendations by:

• Content that has dropped in performance
• Content that you rank for but could rank higher if you optimize
• And keywords you rank for but don’t yet have content on, and so could get more traffic if you created on the topic

 Again, this is great for prioritizing content updates, or simply getting easy wins by working on ones that could rank higher. As for pricing, you can get away with using the basic features at $45 a month if you’re just focused on writing content, but if you want Google Docs integration (which I’ll be honest is a little janky), or the ability to use a different LLM, then you’ll need higher price plans.

TL;DR

Frase is a great, low budget option for content marketers who want to start using AI to help them write and streamline some of their processes. It’s clearly been designed by people who already do the job, and wanted to make their lives easier.

The process it follows of SERP research, outline planning, optimizing, and then internal links are all key steps in the content production process. So the fact this is how it also helps you set up and optimize drafts shows experience behind the design.

Sure it’s missing some of the additional features of other tools, and does have some teething problems and will need humanizing, but it’s a great step towards making your content your own while improving the speed to production.

$45 for 30 articles isn’t bad. Just remember though, you always want to edit and improve them.

Option #3. Surfer SEO

Price:

• Essential: $99/month (or $79/month billed annually)
• Scale: $219/month (or $175/month annually)
• Enterprise: Custom pricing

Best for: Writers and content marketers who want to combine deeper SEO analysis and optimization, alongside AI-assisted content writing in one platform.

Surfer and Frase are incredibly similar in that you can research competitors’ content that ranks for your article topic, outline your draft and more in both tools.

(I mean the UI is almost identical right?)

Likewise, you can also write manually, have the tool draft for you with its AI, or simply use the AI to refine sections.

Where Surfer stands apart is its other SEO features:

• Topical map research
• Keyword traffic volume Chrome extension
• SERP analysis, and
• Ranking tracker

There are also quality of life features such as a WordPress plugin so you can click and send posts from Surfer directly into your WordPress site. I’ll break these down in a second, but first we need to talk about pricing because it’s a little complicated.

So here’s the deal:

All plans come with the writing tool and AI, but not all the SEO features.

The topical map and keyword extension are included in all plans. However the SERP analysis and ranking tracker are an additional $29 and $17 a month on top of the plan if you want them.

The $219 a month plan does come with the SERP analysis included (saving you $29), but not the rank tracker so that’s an added $17.

Like I said, it’s complicated.

There’s also some additional paid credit features for if you want to go outside of content caps using their full AI writing tool.

I’m not a huge fan of adding additional prices like this, but I suppose it does allow users to use more of a feature than others might at their subscription level, without fully moving up and paying for features they might not use.

As for content output limits, it varies on each level but also each writing tool.

Like I said before, its similar to Frase in that there are 2 options for using the AI to help with content:

• Content editor. This is similar to the prompting and improving type feature in Frase
• AI articles. These are ‘one click’ posts that are ‘publish ready’. Basically the tool writes the whole thing. However, I would still also recommend tweaking and editing.

The output limits vary with each feature:

• At $99 a month you can get 20 content editor articles and 5 done for you AI article posts
• While at $219 a month you can get 100 content editor articles and 20 done for you posts
• And then you can pay for credits to get more of these as an addition to each plan, but be aware that the credits don’t roll over each month

Enough about the price though – lets talk about the features.

Content quality

Because this tool is also using ChatGPT 4.0 on the backend the same as the others, you can expect a similar level of quality, and will still need editing and refining – even with the ‘publish ready done for you’ posts.

However, the thing I like about Surfer is that these edits have SEO in mind. So when you ask it to edit, it will also try to keep the post optimized for the focus keyword.

I’ll be honest though, you can simply tell the other tools to do this in your initial prompt or edits, but it’s nice that it’s baked in here so you don’t have to think about it.

Rank tracker

Super handy to see how your content is doing all in one place, however it’s not really needed.

The reason I say this is that if you’re focused on ranking then you’re probably also linkbuilding, and all linkbuilding tools have rank trackers built in.

Keyword traffic volume estimator + SERP difficulty analysis plugin

Now this one I do like, because it helps you find potential content opportunities right inside of Google Chrome.

Basically it shows you traffic volume and keyword difficulty for keywords that you find while browsing.

You can then click on any you like and send them to your Surfer dashboard to remind you to write content on that topic later.

You still need to manually assess using a 3rd party tool to gauge the likelihood of you ranking vs the difficulty of the terms, but it’s a great addition to help and it ties in perfectly with their final SEO tool.

Topical map feature

Google made some big changes recently, in that it started to reward more niche focused websites with being able to actually rank for terms from that niche.

Why do this?

Well, back in the day, huge newspaper websites could write about different affiliate tools and rank – simply because their site was powerful. However, now it seems that they would rather point to a site that’s more specific.

It makes total sense because the best source on the topic would be the niche experts right?

So how do you help Google know what niche your site is about? Simply by covering in depth about various areas of that niche. We call this ‘topical authority’ i.e. you’re clearly an authority on that niche topic.

For example

I run a content marketing blog and sell training that includes AI writing tools. So writing content about content marketing and AI content tools, helps Google understand my site, and makes me more likely to rank on those topics.

Simple really.

The key of course is to do the content research and map out these topics so that you can write them. And Surfer has this built in.

It’s a cool SEO addition that’s great for serious content marketers who want to map out their upcoming content ideas.

TL;DR

So as you can see, Surfer is designed more for professional content marketers that want an AI writing tool, but with additional SEO features.

It’s the next step up from Frase (and more specific than Writesonic), but it does come with the higher costs, at almost double for the entry level and then 4x that for the professional features.

So which is the best GravityWrite alternative for you?

Honestly it comes down to personal preference:

• ChatGPT 4.0 is the cheapest and the same backend tool used in these alternatives. Its cheap at just $20 a month, and has no content output limits. You do need to learn how to use it properly to get the best output, but it can outperform the quality of these other tools for a fraction of the price.
• Frase is the entry level into a professional writing process at $49. Super handy to be able to see intent behind suggestions and do research inside the tool. Great for people who only want to pay for a writing tool and nothing extra.
• While Surfer is even more SEO focused, but more expensive at $99 a month. Better for small teams who have a very specific SEO focus and want those additional features.

Each of these options will help you produce better content thanks than one click drafts, as long as you do the work.