Frase

Founded in 2015 in Boston by Tomas Ratia and Robbie Britt, Frase built its reputation as a content research tool that scrapes top-ranking pages for a keyword and assembles a structured brief — headings, word count targets, People Also Ask questions, and topic coverage — in minutes rather than the hours manual SERP research takes. It's used by a reported 30,000+ marketing teams, with named customers including Oracle, Coursera, GitLab, Thomson Reuters, Under Armour, and ActiveCampaign, and holds a strong 4.8 average on G2 from roughly 300 reviews.

Frase rebuilt its product in January 2026 into what it now calls an "agentic SEO and GEO platform" — a meaningful repositioning, not just new features bolted on, that folds AI-visibility tracking into the core workflow rather than treating it as a bonus. It's built for content marketers, SEO leads, and small-to-mid teams producing roughly 5-20 articles a month who want faster research and structure, not enterprise teams needing the deepest possible on-page NLP scoring — that use case is better served by Surfer SEO.

The Content Brief Generator remains Frase's defining feature and the reason most reviewers recommend it: independent testing consistently reports it cutting SERP research time from roughly two hours to fifteen minutes per article, a concrete, repeatable time saving rather than a vague productivity claim. The 2026 rebuild added GEO Score tracking — real-time scoring for AI-answer-engine visibility (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overviews and AI Mode) alongside traditional SEO scoring in the same editor — and Content Guard, which detects when a live page loses Google ranking and drafts a revision automatically for human approval.

The honest, consistent limitation across independent reviews: Frase's on-page optimization scoring is lighter and less granular than Surfer's NLP-based analysis, and the built-in AI writer is generally regarded as functional rather than exceptional — the brief-generation and research layer is what earns Frase its reputation, not the drafting itself. Frase also doesn't offer keyword volume or backlink data, meaning it's typically paired with Ahrefs or Semrush upstream rather than replacing a full SEO suite.

This is, without real competition, the most volatile pricing history of any tool researched for this site. Multiple otherwise-credible reviews published within months of each other in 2026 cite entry prices of $15, $38, $39, $45, and $49 for what appears to be the same or a comparable tier — and unlike most of the pricing spread we've documented elsewhere (which typically reflects source inconsistency), this case has a clear, documented cause: Frase rebuilt its plan structure in January 2026, renamed its tiers (the old Solo/Basic/Team became Starter/Professional/Scale), raised its entry price, and — genuinely in buyers' favor — folded its previously separate $35/month GEO tracking add-on into every plan.

Based on the most recent sources (dated July 2026), current pricing appears to be:

• Starter — roughly $39/month (annual billing): around 10 articles/month, GEO tracking across 2 AI platforms.
• Professional — roughly $103–109/month: around 40 articles/month.
• Scale — roughly $239–299/month: around 100 articles/month, expanded audit page allowance.

If you've seen an older review quoting $15/month, that figure is genuinely outdated, not a source error — a rare case where we can point to the exact reason for the discrepancy rather than just flagging that one exists.