[Review] Frase.io The Best Ai Writer for 2023.

Learning how to write quality content that will rank in Google search engines can seem like black magic sometimes. With Frase.io, they lift the curtain to equip you with the tools to consistently rank content.

In this article, I’ll share with you my experience using the Frase ai writing tool, the key features, pricing, and some pros and cons.

By the end of this Frase review, you’ll have a good idea of whether this tool is right for you.

Let’s get started.

What is Frase.io

Frase is a powerful tool that helps you conduct research, create outlines, write and optimize the articles to achieve high-quality SEO content. With the optional pro add on, you can also use their proprietary ai technology to assist you in your writing and content generation through native Frase and community driven ai templates.

Who is Frase for?

Frase is perfect for anyone who does content marketing as part of their daily workflow.

Freelancer writers can use Frase to quickly create relevant content in minutes. Generate question ideas during the Research step to ensure common questions are answered.

Agencies can write detailed content briefs to share with their clients and other writers. As a business owner, they would purchase this as part of their in house marketing software stack.

Content Strategists can use Frase to create SEO friendly content by carefully analyzing search intent in the Research step and cover any topic gaps through competitor analysis.

What Sets Frase Apart From Competitors

There are three main features that set Frase apart.

First, their Research feature is incredibly in depth and well laid out to quickly write briefs and outlines. This feature alone should save you 2 hours or more per article.

Secondly, their ai has now migrated over to OpenAI’s Davinci model which puts them on par with all of the other leading ai writers on the market. Here’s what Frase’s co-founder posted in the Frase community group.

Frase is currently using OpenAl’s Davinci as the default model, the so-called “GPT 3.5” (i.e. their
latest model). We are still evaluating performance but SO far the response has been overwhelmingly
positive

-Tommy Rgo in the Frase Facebook Community

Finally, the community managed ai templates are off the charts. The output I’ve been able to achieve is truly unbelievable. I haven’t tried every single ai writer on the market, but from my research, there are no other ai writers that allow community members to modify the ai’s input via templates.

Why I’m Qualified to Review Frase

Frase is currently the only software I use to assist me in writing these blog posts. I also use SEO tools like ahrefs, but all of my content is created inside the Frase editor.

I research, outline, write and optimize everything in Frase and then assemble it in WordPress before I publish it.

This doesn’t mean I won’t recommend other software in the future (I’m looking to try Jasper soon), but I’ve watched this software grow from the beginning and have been impressed with the progress.

I also have the pro add on for the unlimited ai writer because the community templates (discussed later) are so incredibly powerful and unique and I just don’t have a need to add another tool to my stack at this time.

With that, let’s get started with a quick dashboard overview of Frase.

Dashboard Overview

Frase has a simple dashboard setup with the primary options on the left. You’ll spend the majority of your time in the Documents part of this app as this is where the research, outlines, writing, and optimization happens.

In the workspace area on the right, you can sort by User and Status which you can toggle between Researching, Writing, Optimizing, Completed and Published. 

From here, start by selecting the New Document option to go to the content brief flow.

Writing Content Briefs in Minutes

Whether you’re writing for yourself or outsourcing the content creation process, writing a content brief is going to be the most efficient way to get a writer up to speed on what your content goals are for a particular article.

Frase wastes no time in getting you results. In the New Document flow, you’ll be presented with two main workflows: Create new content or Optimize existing content.

Create New Content

When creating new content it’s important to set the country correctly because search results will vary from country to country. You also have the option at this point to add it to a specific folder to group your articles together.

Target Search Query is where you type in the target keywords that you want to rank for and not necessarily the parent keyword. For example, use “how to affiliate market on Pinterest” instead of “affiliate marketing Pinterest”

For the rest of the review, I will use this Pinterest example using the new content workflow.

Optimize Existing Content

I use this option in two different ways. To optimize my already published articles or to look at the topic optimization score for a client’s article to suggest edits to freshen up the content.

If you select this option you will need to supply the Import URL so Frase will know where to pull the content from to complete the analysis.

Research Feature

This is where the massive time savings begins. After selecting a new document and supplying the query (I’ll use “how to affiliate market on Pinterest” for this demo), Frase prompts you to start your research.

Pressing Let’s Go will start pulling and summarizing search result topics via their ai. Headers along with other topical information are presented in a nice ordered list for the top 20 search results on Google for the query you entered.

At this point, you know the average word count is 3.6k with 8 headers and 7 links within the article. This helps you get a rough idea of how long and in depth your article should be if you want to have a chance at ranking.

Headings Dropdown in Research

If you change the dropdown to Headings, you can view all the heading tags for the top 20 results. This turns out to be a really long list of headers, but Frase takes care of this in another feature called Outline which is covered further down in this article.

Questions Dropdown in Research

To round out your articles you typically want to include a frequently asked question heading in your articles. This is where the Questions option comes in.

In this dropdown you have the option to select a question and answer source like People Also Ask (from Google), Quora, the popular question answer site, and Reddit.

In the example below, someone on Quora is asking if you can “use affiliate marketing without a blog.” This is a very specific question around this topic that I would not have come up with on my own unless I was deep in that niche.

This is just one example of the power with which Frase can surface very nuanced topics to make sure you are covering all your content bases.

Automate Content Brief

Automated content briefs are useful for quickly jotting down the summary of the ai research and beginning to piece together your outline.

Planning ahead of time, helps your article stay on track without writing a bunch of fluff that no one is searching about.

I recommend using this alongside a manual outline which I discuss in the next section. 

To create an automated brief follow these steps:

1. Note that your automated brief will generate in the Content Brief tab regardless of where you initiate this action. So be sure to write your content in the My Content tab to ensure you don’t overwrite content on accident with the ai.
2. Next, select SERP Overview in the dropdown
3. Check the brief options you want to include in the auto generation. I like to include questions and statistics sometimes depending on the article’s goal.
4. Click the Insert Brief into Editor button
5. Your automated brief will end up in the workspace on the left.

From this point, you can either create a new tab in the editor to add your manual outline or continue to manually add it at the bottom of the Content Brief tab.

Outline Feature

The Outline builder feature presents you with a horizontal view of all of the top 20 headers. From the Explore tab, you simply click to add the header from the left workspace into your content outline on the right.

Run out of content ideas? Keep scrolling right to see more headers to get more ideas. If you see a trend in the topics, it is likely a topic that is important to cover in your blog article.

Below I have selected my main H1, followed by my main H2 topic, and a mix of H3s from the Shopify article and the article beside it.

I would then continue to the right and add any relevant headers to fill in my content gaps and complete my outline.

What would normally take several hours to piece together between multiple tools can now be achieved in minutes.

Another handy feature in Frase is the ability to easily drag and drop headers up and down to reorder them into a more logical order for your article.

You can even drag them left and right to promote or demote your headers between H1-H5 (see below)

Once you save your outline it’s time to decide if you want the AI to assist in the outline summary.

Ai Topic Summary

In the Summarize tab, click the Summarize button to have the ai insert the key topics from its research results. 

This step can take several minutes if you have a lot of headers, but Frase gives you an estimated time frame.

Once your summary is ready, your editor will show you the results of the key topics summarized from all the top results. You can simply paste this summary into your editor and start writing content or you can take this one step further and have the ai write the entire first draft.

Writing an Automated Draft with Ai

Before automating drafts on multiple articles, try it on one article to see if you like the results. Using this feature will use ai writing credits.

Whether you are on the Solo, Basic, or Team premium tier, 20,000 characters per month are included.

Now back to this amazing feature. If you want to basically eliminate writer’s block forever, follow these steps:

1. Reminder again, your ai generated draft will show up in the Content Brief tab.
2. Review the topics that are summarized to make sure you are happy with them. You can always remove individual sections
3. If you don’t like any of them you can click re-summarize to get a whole new batch of topic summaries.
4. If you’re happy with the topics, click Write Draft and watch the magic start.

Within a few minutes, you will have an entire draft written by the ai based on the topic keywords and your article title. Of course, this works better with some topics compared to others.

Typically I find that articles that have a lot of content online will have better ai written results.

I do want to stress however, you should never publish the article that the ai wrote without editing it for several reasons.

First, the ai does not fact check any of your content. While it could potentially pull the correct stat, that would be the exception to the rule.

Also, using ai generated content is simply against Google’s terms of service, so while Google’s algorithms are getting smarter at detecting this, you can bet they will release an update in the future that could potentially wipe out all your hard work if you just published ai drafts verbatim.

Instead, use it to aid you in your introductions, conclusions, and transitions from topic to topic.

For example, here is some ai content for the Pinterest demo:

Affiliates are people who earn commissions by promoting products and services online. This includes affiliate marketing, where you recommend products and services to others. In return, you receive a commission when someone buys something because of your recommendation.

I would rewrite this to pass any checks by Google in the future and to know for certain it is 100% unique, plagiarism-free content:

Affiliate marketers are content creators who earn commissions by promoting other people’s products and services. By essentially referring web traffic from the content, if the reader ends up purchasing due to the recommendation, the affiliate would receive a commission.

(my rewritten version)

To come up with that type of topic flow might be easy for a subject matter expert, but what if you were someone that didn’t even work in marketing? This type of paragraph would be difficult to write without ai assistance or a lot of revisions.

Content Writing

Now that you have researched your topic, and filled in any gaps with a proper outline, it’s time to fire up the content editor and start writing content.

The vast majority of the time spent creating long-form content is during this phase where you will use the ai to assist you in your writing which we will cover next.

AI Write Feature

Next, we have the ai writing feature. If you want the ai to generate meaningful long-form content, you have to learn how to use this feature properly.

This feature has all of the Frase team’s ai templates and community generated templates combined.

My main gripe with this feature is how it is currently laid out. You have to know who in the community creates good templates and basically memorize a few acronyms which are very counterintuitive and not user friendly if you are brand new to Frase.

What is an Ai Template

The ai templates in Frase were created to help steer the ai to a specific outcome based on the input. As such, each template will have an objective.

For example, the template below by community member Matt Zimmerman has one specific objective which is to create paragraphs from some background input. 

The use case could be to rewrite existing paragraphs from a real blog. To continue with our Pinterest demo, I’ve added a new H2 and pasted actual content in the editor. After selecting the Paragraphs from Background template, it is now asking for input.

The templates are now smarter and will add your Title and Heading fields for you (usually the H2 above your cursor).

That leaves you to populate the Background Knowledge field. In this example, I’ve pasted the real article content right into that field and clicked Run Tool.

Here’s what the ai generated:

Pinterest is a great platform for passive income because it’s a place where people spend lots of time browsing through pictures. People are constantly searching for new ideas, products, and services. As a result, there’s a lot of opportunity to drive traffic to your website.

Pins have a longer shelf life than tweets, so if you’ve already created a pin that’s relevant to a certain topic, it can still generate traffic for you. Plus, since Pinterest is a visual search engine, it makes sense that people would click on a picture before reading any accompanying text.

So if you want to make money on Pinterest, you need to optimize your pins. Start by choosing a niche that interests you. Then find out what terms people are typing into Google to find related topics. Once you know those keywords, write a description that answers questions people might ask themselves when they land on your pin.

Then, once you’ve written a compelling description, add a link to your website. Finally, include a call to action button that encourages people to visit your site.

Once you’ve done all that, you’re ready to start earning money on Pinterest.

I would rate that output 8 out of 10. It’s pretty good and even suggested using google to find what people were searching which wasn’t even part of the input, so the ai came up with that concept on its own.

From here I would rewrite that entire section in my own words while fact checking what it said to ensure 100% fresh content.

From this point, it’s about trying and learning which template works for your writing style. You will find that the quality of your input is what really drives the output.

If you find you’re getting consistently bad results, it’s likely because the input is not good enough or the ai is not trained sufficiently on the topic and you’ll have to come up with content the old fashion way.

Optimize Feature

By this point, you should have a well researched article, with an outline and a decent amount of content written either with or without the ai.

The final part of this feature review is the Optimize feature.

Content optimization is where Frase scores the topics and headers that are written about across all the top 20 search results. Then it summarizes it in a very simple paint by numbers counter.

Going back to our Pinterest demo article, I am currently at a score of 26%. The average is the line to the right which is around the 47% range and each Long Tail keyword has a color coded status

• Green = the keyword was mentioned a sufficient number of times – don’t add or subtract this keyword in any more content.
• Yellow = the keyword is almost mentioned enough times – mention this keyword more in the content.
• Red = the keyword is mentioned too many times – remove some content with this keyword in it or reword content.
• White = the keyword was not mentioned at all – add more content with this keyword in it.

Based on the data Frase is giving me, I need to add quite a few more keywords (add more headers and written content to make that board go green) before I can meet or exceed the Frase content optimization score target of 46%.

I would then continue to write and check this real-time score until I am happy with the score.

So I know what you’re thinking, this is really gimmicky. At least that’s how I felt when I started using this feature. It feels so unnatural because it is.

And this isn’t just a Frase feature, the other leading ai-powered tool Surfer SEO uses the exact same feature.

But this is currently one of the factors of how Google determines the topical relevance of content so until Frase finds a better way, we just follow the tool because it has proven to work once your content ranks (you’ll only know if you try to edit your content for a better score yourself).

In order to prevent the scoring mechanism from affecting my writing, I only optimize when I’ve finished an entire draft of an article. If you use it from the beginning, it’s too easy to get swayed by trying to achieve a 100% rating and taking the focus off of what matters – quality content. Don’t fall into that trap!

Publish Your Article

By the end of the optimization phase, give it one last review or even better, take a break and come back a day later if you have the time and just give it one last edit, then publish your well researched and optimized content.

Congrats, you just published your first ai article!

Pricing

I’ll start with the bad news. Frase does not have a free tier option, however, they do have a 5-day free trial for $1.

Here’s the breakdown for the pricing plans.

The most budget option is $14.99 per month followed by the Basic plan at $44.99 all the way to $114.99 for the Team plan. With each tier, you are increasing the number of articles you can write and optimize per month.

Each tier comes with 20,000 characters of ai generated content so that is consistent across the board.

I would recommend if you’re just starting out, just start with Solo as you can always upgrade later.

If you have 1-2 clients, then consider the Basic (middle) tier as 4 documents per month likely won’t be enough.

The main challenge I see with the Basic tier is that there is still only a single-user license. If this was increased to 2, perhaps it would be more attractive. You could use one seat for yourself and one for your outsourced writer for example.

For unlimited document credits, you’ll need to upgrade to the Team level.

The $35 Pro Add On

Whether you select the Solo, Basic or Team plan, you still have the option to add the Pro Add on which gives you:

• Keyword Search Volume – monthly search volume in the Outline step
• SERP data – domain authority and backlink data to search results
• Frase Ai Writer – unlimited access to the ai writer. The primary reason to upgrade

If you are signing up for the trial, pay particular attention to whether you are adding this $35 add on. You may receive a larger bill than expected if you are just clicking through quickly.

At $1 for 5 days of taking the tool for a spin, there’s really no reason why you shouldn’t try it out.

Tutorials

These are the resources I recommend to quickly get started.

• Frase runs weekly webinars that anyone can join. Register Here.
• Frase internal wiki – Every feature is broken down in the wiki curated by the Frase team. May topics include video tutorials as well as written ones.
• Youtube – Unlimited supply of tutorials, but I would recommend starting with Ranking Tactics channel to quickly get going and stay up to date.
• If you are still stuck and just want to chat with me 1:1, you can contact me here. I’ll be happy to help get you started.

Integrations

Frase currently has 3 free integration options if you don’t want to use the Frase content editor.

Google Search Console

If you have a google search console integration set up, you can take advantage of their content analytics feature.

With this feature, it will pull in your search console data to show you where your content opportunities lie.

You can also view your other metrics like impressions, clicks, top-ranking pages, and average CTR.

Google Docs Add On

If you work exclusively in google docs, you can take the Frase content score feature from into your Google doc now.

Just download the add on from the marketplace and you will be able to see your topic score and competitor content in the right sidebar. Here is the Frase help guide to install this integration.

WordPress Plugin

Similar to the Google Doc plugin, if you work mostly in WordPress during your content creation phase, you can install this optional plugin for free.

It also gives you the topic score right inside your WordPress Gutenberg editor.

In order to get the topic score to show up in WordPress you’ll need to generate a share document from Frase.

Wrapping it Up

When it comes to content optimization tools, it’s hard not to consider Frase as one of the top content writers on the market.

From complete writer’s block to SEO-optimized content and unlimited documents, there is so much packed into this tool suite which starts at $14.99.

Many of you will be coming from the Jasper + Surfer SEO combo which starts at $24 per month for Jasper and $49 for the basic plan for Surfer (unless you stay on the free tier).

Either way, Frase is going to be a less expensive option to get you started for a similar feature set of content optimization + ai writing credits.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much of this article was generated by ai?

The final written content was 0% generated by ai, but the outline and draft were 100% written by ai, and then manually rewritten to be 100% unique which is how I recommend you use any ai tool, not just Frase.

Is there a Roadmap for Frase?

Frase has recently conducted a survey to consider its 2023 roadmap. Consider joining the Frase Facebook community to stay up to date. This is where the roadmap will likely be posted.

What integrations are available?

Yes, there are currently 3 integrations available. Google Search Console, WordPress Plugin, and a Google Doc plugin. These are covered in this section above.

What languages are supported?

The Frase content editor supports English, French, Spanish, German, Danish, Dutch, Portuguese, Italian, Norwegian, Finnish, Swedish, Romanian, Polish, Russian, Hindi, Indonesian, Malay, Thai, Japanese and Korean

Language toggles are discussed in this help article. 

Is the Pro add on worth it?

Compared to other similar products I would recommend adding the Pro Add on if you are not an experienced writer and need to generate 4 articles a month.

Note, even without the $35 Pro Add on, all paid tiers already come with 20,000 ai generated characters. The best way to measure if you need the Pro Add on is to see how many articles you can get through before upgrading.

If you are using Jasper ai and the Surfer SEO content optimizer, this would set you back a minimum of $73.

Compared to the Solo plan from Frase which is $14.99 + $35 for the unlimited Pro ai add on, this would still be less expensive and you would only need to use a single tool versus two separate tools to achieve similar results.

What is the Frase Answer Engine?

Frase’s Answer assistant is their own version of the generic chatbot. By initiating an initial crawl of your website data, Frase Answer will create an intelligent knowledge base.

Then when you train and turn on the chatbot, it will learn to serve up the optimal information to your website visitors. 

When it fails to produce a good result, you can configure it to defer to live chat based on specific scenarios.

To learn more about Frase Answer, check out this help article.

Where can I check my Ai Credits?

To check how many characters your account has produced per month, go to Account > Subscription page.

Does Frase have a LTD (lifetime deal)?

Currently, there are no plans to have a lifetime deal for Frase. A while back, they were listed on App Sumo (and possibly other LTD deal sites) so it is possible to buy in the secondary market if anyone is willing to sell it.

Does Frase have an affiliate program?

Yes, Frase has an affiliate program where they pay 30% on recurring subscription revenue among other perks like 60-day cookies and swipe files. Find out more about their affiliate program here.