As a new addition to the tech stack, AI content generators (aka AI content writing tools) aim to make content marketing more efficient and cost-effective.
But do they? And which ones provide the best results?
It’s incredibly challenging to find unbiased reviews of these new tools, because most of the search results are filled with affiliate links.
But not this one. Nope.
(We received zero dollars for any links to the tools below. But we do mention Clearscope itself, although it isn’t a content generation tool.)
Below, I'll introduce you to 11 top AI content writing tools, highlighting their best use cases.
These tools have been personally tested by me or another content expert on the Clearscope team, ensuring you can find the perfect fit for your own marketing needs.
But first: If you're wondering whether these tools are worth it, like any other tool that helps you get a job done, it truly depends on how you use them.
While AI tools can boost productivity and creativity, they require careful use to avoid potential pitfalls.
READ MORE:
Best AI content writing tools
Okay, here are my votes for top tools based on a few different categories.
Best all around AI writer: ChatGPT
Best for Google-aligned content and Google Workspace: Gemini (of course)
Best for solopreneurs or freelancers: ChatGPT
Best for enterprise teams: Jasper.ai
Best for creating content that meets search intent: Clearscope.io (Okay, so I'm a bit biased here, and Clearscope doesn't generate content... but I included Clearscope for good reasons — more on that below)
Obviously, these suggestions are based on my own professional opinion… but here’s a bit about what went into informing these choices:
I’ve been in content marketing in some form for a decade plus now, and I was skeptical about AI writing assistant tools at first.
But I’ve come to embrace the ones that allow me to use them to assist, streamline, and scale my content strategy in a high-quality, people-first way—rather than overtake my strategy or production process entirely.
In addition, the Clearscope team is proudly full of content, product engineering, and SEO nerds (I include myself here!), and we take quality and community feedback seriously.
Overall, your individual inputs for these tools will determine the quality of the content generated.
But in addition to my own tests, I examined G2 community reviews for each of the tools listed below for user satisfaction and quality.
Simplicity was also prioritized when choosing the best AI content generation tools based on use cases above.
At Clearscope, we're big fans of simplicity—a simple tech stack is often an efficient tech stack.
Why you should trust us: 11 AI content generation tools tested
Keep in mind: Most of the tools below offer a free plan to give it a try before you buy.
I didn’t include any pricing information below since platform pricing can change, so you’ll need to check each site individually for their current pricing.
Here’s the criteria I used when evaluating each of these tools:
Cost
Speed
Accuracy
Security
Collaboration
1. ChatGPT
I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the free tool that brought AI writers to the forefront of many marketer’s minds: ChatGPT.
OpenAI launched ChatGPT to the public on November 30, 2022.
But because of ChatGPT’s free access and easy conversational chat based in natural language processing, it increased the comfort level of AI copy generation for many of us—even though many AI content writing tools existed prior to its launch in 2022.
It’s also come a long way from the GPT-3 we were all first experimenting with: ChatGPT-4o was recently released with expanded functionality and is available for anyone to try.
Who would benefit from using ChatGPT?
If you’re exploring AI writing software, the free vision of ChatGPT is a great start due to its simplicity; it’s incredibly user-friendly and doesn’t require more than a question or prompt to get started.
Recommended reading: How To Engineer Better AI Prompts for Your SEO Content Strategy
Here’s what ChatGPT can do to enhance your content marketing and copywriting workflow:
Social copy: Emulates the style of existing posts to create on-brand social content.
Titles and headers: Turns rough content ideas into infinite heading variants.
Website copy: Generates hero copy, title variations, and value propositions.
Ideas and brainstorming: Identifies related ideas based on a starting topic.
Meta descriptions: Creates usable summaries that work well as metadata.
Feedback: Provides feedback on weak arguments (but not factual).
Rephrasing and summarizing:
Grouping like items: Useful for keyword clustering following keyword research.
We’ll also discuss AI content creation software platforms below that offer more capabilities than ChatGPT.
But it’s important to know: Many of them use OpenAI’s GPT as a natural language processor, so you can often get the same results plus more features.
On May 23, 2024, we polled our Clearscope Webinar audience—primarily made up of SEOs and content marketers—to see what they thought.
Out of the 168 who responded, 68% felt that ChatGPT was the most reliable and trustworthy out of the AI chat models.
While we acknowledge that’s a limited sample size, this group is one of the most engaged with these technologies, so it bears mentioning.
2. Google’s Gemini and Gemini Advanced
This is one of my favorite AI chat experiences that can also help you write or rephrase copy—especially for SEO content.
Why?
Because you can ask Google itself what it thinks about content-first SEO best practices based on current Google algorithms.
That’s pretty handy, if you ask me!
There is a free version of Gemini that operates very similarly to ChatGPT that you’re likely familiar with, and Google now offers Gemini Advanced, which integrates with Google Workspace easily.
Who would benefit from using Gemini?
One benefit of using Gemini for copy generation is that it will offer current information from across the web in real time, including scheduled future events.
However, it’s crucial to fact check any content or copy generated, as with any AI content generating software product, inaccuracies pop up.
3. Jasper
AI-content generator Jasper has 50+ templates for long- and short-form content. That way, you can easily tackle different types of content across one platform.
Some of Jasper.ai’s most useful templates include:
Amazon product descriptions
Meta title and descriptions
Social media posts
Email subject lines
Image generation
Video description
Personal bios
To help content writers fight against writers' block, there’s a Blog Post Intro paragraph template to get initial ideas flowing.
There's also a chat feature, but I found that it produced some unusually formatted results on occasion.
Who would benefit from using Jasper.ai?
Jasper.ai can generate copy with the click of a button in a variety of different content formats, which comes in pretty handy for marketers.
But because Jasper relies on the data it's been trained on, content outputs on niche topics or complex subjects might be inaccurate.
Jasper also struggles with highly creative content or subjects that require highly accurate technical knowledge.
As an AI content generator, it drafts content based on consensus information—not on perspective-driven or information-gain content.
So it still requires human expertise, and it’s not necessarily a content-first SEO tool.
I did experiment with creating a couple articles optimized for SEO with the platform, but when I ran the content through Clearscope, I found that still was a lot of editing work to do in order to properly meet search intent for SEO.
I also found that the AI didn’t perform as I had hoped when using the chat feature, but I found the templates truly helpful and enjoyed using them.
Overall, this tool can be a great starting point for general marketing copy task automation, like emails, ecommerce product listings, newsletters, ad copy, and social posts.
And Jasper makes it very easy to share content guidelines and brand voice across teams.
Learn more: How to stand out from AI content with thought leadership with Chima Mmeje of Moz
4. Copy.ai
Copy.ai requires little human input to generate copy, outlines, and ideas—and there’s an entire library of workflows to choose from to help make things easy.
There’s a SEO Optimized Blog workflow template that only requires a few pieces of information:
Keywords
Unique insights or beliefs to add to the blog
After a few inputs, the AI-generator then scrapes search results and builds a blog post outline, provides a few talking points for each heading or a full draft, and includes a list of keywords that the article generator should include.
After you build an outline, you then have to copy it and manually enter it into the blog creation workflow, and it can take a bit of time to both generate the outline and the article.
A quick look at Copy.ai’s capabilities
Copy.ai supports over 25 languages so it could potentially be useful for content creators building global marketing campaigns.
Learn more: How to harness the power of multilingual SEO with Adriana Stein
The company also now markets itself as a platform for your “go-to-market team” and includes prospecting, sales, and CRM workflows into the platform.
It also offers marketing workflows, including ai content writing tools like email series and repurposing calls into blog posts.
However, it drafts content by scraping other content that already exists on the web.
So writers and content marketers should stay on their toes, because (like other AI content generation tools), Copy.ai’s drafted content will lack the unique voice, expertise, and perspective of a human writer, potentially making it feel generic.
And even though I used the “Create an SEO optimized brief” workflow, and then ran the blog article workflow, there was still much work needed.
After running the content through Clearscope, the grade indicated there was still plenty of editing work to complete before search intent was sharply met.
5. Writesonic
Writesonic is an AI tool with specific features designed to create copy that increases both leads and sales.
One group of templates is geared towards long-form content writing and lets you create articles, sum up content, and reword as required.
The other set of templates is designed for copywriters with options for generating landing pages, product descriptions, and social media captions.
Read: Optimizing web content: Product pages, blog posts, and more
A quick look at Writesonic’s capabilities
Writesonic is similar to Jasper.AI in the variety of content forms that you can produce and could benefit marketing teams looking to generate a wide variety of content types.
This AI writer uses a credit-based system where you can use more credits to purchase a higher-quality content piece.
You’ll walk through a couple easy prompts, select your keywords and references, tone of voice, select your headings and secondary keywords, and more.
It also includes an SEO checker, which you have to run separately after generating a blog article based on SEO keywords.
From my test of the tool, we found the suggested primary and secondary SEO keywords to be... lacking.
And after using the tool to generate an SEO blog article, I ran the draft through its own SEO checker and received a score of 57—so there was much more work to be done on the tool’s own content, according to the Writesonic SEO checker.
All in all, this AI content generation tool may work best for generic copy creation tasks.
6. Article Forge
Article Forge is another content generator that concentrates on creating original SEO content.
Just like other tools on this list, it requires minimum human input; however, Article Forge specifically markets “true SEO automation” to set up your SEO efforts on autopilot.
(After many, many years doing high-results SEO strategy work, I’m skeptical of this claim. SEO isn’t something that usually sits on autopilot successfully.)
But, all in all, Article Forge does offer convenience.
Enter a keyword or any other useful information, and the deep learning model will produce a complete article with headings, text, images, videos, and even links.
A quick look at Article Forge’s capabilities
While Article Forge advertises accurate content generation capabilities, it's not a replacement for in-depth, high-quality content creation.
It does allow users to research in real-time, which offers a nice alternative to some other ai content generation tools.
However, as an AI content writing tool based on a machine learning language model, it is unable to offer unique perspectives, insight, or information gain to the topic at hand.
That’s up to the humans using it!
7. Rytr
Rytr is another popular writing assistant and content generator. It also allows you to paraphrase and rework copy easily.
The toolset comes with 30 templates designed to help create copy for CTAs, email series, Google ads, and product descriptions. There are also several templates for generating long-form content and blog outlines.
Unlike some of the other tools on this list, Rytr lets you change your tone by providing 20+ available writing tones. You can also choose from 25+ input languages.
A quick look at Rytr’s capabilities
Similar to Jasper.AI, Rytr struggles with highly creative content or subjects that require specialist knowledge because it drafts content based on consensus information.
And, strangely, it gives you the option to select a creativity level and indicates choices for content that’s less factual.
It can help you save time with general marketing copy tasks, like emails, landing page copy, review and customer support replies, and social posts. It also has a plagiarism checker.
8. Peppertype (also known as Pepper Content)
Built by the content marketplace Pepper Content, Peppertype is an AI content assistant.
The AI toolset specializes in generating copy ideas for social media captions, ads, and SEO meta descriptions.
A quick look at Peppertype’s capabilities
While it’s geared more towards short-form copy outputs, like product descriptions, it can assist with long-form content too.
For content updates, there are Content Rewriter, Content Simplifier, and Content Expander templates.
To help eliminate writers' block there are Paragraph Writer and Blog Heading Expander templates.
Although the tool does market itself as a one-stop-shop for overall SEO strategy (which, as mentioned above, isn’t really something you can set on autopilot), one of the biggest benefits to Peppertype might be it’s creator pool to help you scale your content.
9. Anyword.ai
Anyword leverages artificial intelligence to generate and optimize marketing copy across various channels like websites, social media posts, emails, and advertisements.
Anyword offers a few different features than the other ai writing tools on this list: performance prediction and A/B testing capabilities.
Anyword’s AI content generation also works with a few different platforms, including ChatGPT, Notion, and HubSpot. You can input guidelines into every prompt for personalized results for each output.
It offers a few different paid plans based on your desired use level, but getting all the features may be cost-prohibitive for some teams.
10. Frase
Just for fun, here’s what AI has to say to me about Frase:
According to Google’s Gemini, Frase “is not necessarily the strongest AI writing tool, but it shines in the research and planning stages of content development.”
We’re not sure how Gemini would know this firsthand, especially since it has some of the highest G2 reviews in this list (other than Clearscope, of course!).
But from a quick test, we would agree with Gemini.
A quick look at Frase’s capabilities
The most notable feature of Frase, especially from a content-first SEO perspective, is the ease of organizing the outline in its right sidebar. That’s a pretty nice feature.
They also have plenty of copywriting and idea generating frameworks to choose from, which can help you stay organized.
However, on the free test plan, I was left confused by how many clicks were required of me to generate an article compared to the other tools I tested.
And an Ahrefs article noted that Frase provided the lowest correlation between rankings and content scores in their limited study of content optimization tools.
I tested Frase’s AI-generated SEO content myself within Clearscope reports, and it received a grade that indicated that additional work was needed to truly optimize this content for search intent.
Overall, Frase is very similar to other tools in this listing, but it does have a strong fan base with 4.8 out of 5 stars in G2 reviews.
11. Clearscope.io
Okay, so Clearscope is us—we’re obviously biased, but for a good reason.
Clearscope offers AI-assisted content writing that is focused on high-quality SEO performance and alignment with user search intent.
We’re not looking to replace subject matter experts or experienced writers who can provide much-needed and highly valued necessary information gain to SEO content.
Instead, Clearscope works to make sure your subject matter expertise shines by ensuring your content is optimized successfully for your target search intent—and, of course, for Page 1 Google results.
Our platform also uses 3 of the most powerful LLMs available and the most in-depth analysis of your content competitors that the market offers.
There’s also a WordPress plugin along with Google Docs and Microsoft Word add-ons to speed up the creation workflow.
And you can generate an AI-assisted outline within the platform with the click of a button (plus, you can use your preferred AI content generator to assist with your first draft).
But don’t just take our word for it.
It’s not just an awesome workflow.
Clearscope has a passionate team of content-first SEO experts standing by to support you and the highest G2 Reviews in this listing with 4.9 out of 5 stars.
Ready to try the best content-first AI-powered SEO tool?
The key to getting the best out of AI content generators is to use them where your team needs a helping hand.
Whether that’s writing hundreds of product descriptions, increasing the readability of your copy for your target audience, or generating some unique title ideas, that’s where AI writing tools really shine.
But as far as SEO content goes?
Well, we recommend following Google’s guidelines and using AI as your draft assistant instead of relying on it as a writer or SEO specialist.
When you set realistic expectations, AI content tools have the potential to enhance your marketing campaigns and save you hours of work.
Ready to give the best content-first AI-powered SEO platform on the market a try? Request a demo.
Contributing Authors
The original version of this article was published September 15, 2023, by guest contributor Holly Stanley. It was updated June 3, 2024, to include updated education on current best tools and practices by the Clearscope team.
Featured image source.
