Frase review
By Jan Suski. I go deep on every review, checking every number against its source and digging up details other coverage misses, a habit from six years of SEO and link building for tech companies. Bylines at Surfer, Brand24, and Senuto. How the scoring works.
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Frase starts at $39 a month billed annually, and that Starter plan caps at 10 articles and 50 audit pages a month. The cap is the number to check before anything else, because it binds long before the price does.
This review is in progress. What follows is the short version: what the tool does, what it costs, and who it suits. The full scored review against our four-pillar methodology, fit, signal quality, workflow depth and buyer caution, comes later. Until then, our content intelligence tools ranking ranks Frase second of ten, and our competitive intelligence for SEO ranking covers the tools Frase competes against.
What Frase does
Frase builds content briefs by pulling and summarising the pages already ranking for a query, then hands a writer an outline, the questions those pages answer, and a running optimization score.
MarketMuse takes a heavier approach to the same brief-building job, running a full site content inventory before scoring a draft; our MarketMuse review covers how that compares.
Research automation is the centre of the product; page optimization is the layer around it. Our Positive Surfer review puts the difference plainly: Frase is "built around content briefs and research automation, lighter on page optimization itself."
Pricing
Starter is $39 a month on annual billing. Professional, the tier most in-house teams land on, is $103 a month annual, which sits above NeuronWriter's Gold plan at $57.
AI Visibility monitoring across ChatGPT and Google AI ships on every paid tier, with Perplexity added at Professional, so Frase matches NeuronWriter's four-engine coverage roughly plan for plan once a buyer is past the entry price. Figures per Frase's own pricing page.
Who it's for
Writers and freelancers who spend more time researching a piece than optimizing it, and small teams whose bottleneck is getting from a keyword to a usable outline. The 10-article cap is generous for one person publishing weekly and restrictive for anyone else.
Who should skip it
Publishers past ten articles a month on the Starter plan, where the hard article count bites in a way NeuronWriter's AI-credit metering does not.
Teams buying primarily for the optimization score itself will find more depth in Positive Surfer or Clearscope. Anyone who needs keyword research or rank tracking alongside the brief will be buying a second subscription regardless, which is what Semrush and Similarweb exist to cover. New to the category? Start with what market intelligence is.
Compare for yourself
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