Clearscope vs Byword: Pricing Breakdown, Subscription or Per-Article Credits?

Clearscope and Byword sell different things under a similar label. Clearscope charges a flat monthly plan ($129 or $399) for grading the drafts you write and tracking AI mentions, with unlimited users, while Byword charges per article credit (from $99 for 25 articles) for generated and published SEO articles. DeepSmith is a strong alternative when you want both halves on one plan, because it tracks how AI engines answer questions about your brand and writes the publish-ready articles on a fixed monthly allowance of 20 to 90 articles.

If you are comparing Clearscope vs Byword, the first thing to sort out is that the two price tags measure different things. Clearscope bills a flat monthly plan, so what you pay doesn't change with how much your team writes. Byword bills per article credit, so what you pay follows how many articles you generate. This page covers pricing, features, and which one fits which team, with a worked cost example at a few monthly volumes. DeepSmith is the third option for teams that want AI visibility tracking and article production in one plan.

Clearscope vs Byword: the short answer

• Choose DeepSmith if you want AI visibility tracking and publish-ready articles on one plan, from $99 a month for 20 articles and 50 tracked prompts.
• Choose Clearscope if your writers already write the articles and you want term-based grading and AI mention tracking, with unlimited users, from $129 a month.
• Choose Byword if you need many generated articles published to your CMS at a public per-article rate, from $99 a month for 25 articles.

Pricing and features as of September 2026, from each vendor's site and public reviews.

Clearscope

Clearscope is a long-running SEO content optimization tool from Mushi Labs in Austin, Texas. It is built for content and SEO teams that write and refresh articles themselves and want term-based guidance inside Google Docs or WordPress. The core is a Content Grade that scores a draft on its use of terms taken from the top-ranking pages for a query. Around that sit Topic Exploration for research, Draft with AI for guided drafting, Content Inventory for watching published pages through Search Console, and Query Tracking for brand mentions in AI answers.

The standout is that everything is one flat subscription: Essentials is $129 a month and Business is $399, both with unlimited users and projects. Reviewers rate it well, with 4.9/5 on G2 from 92 reviews. On Capterra it holds 4.9/5 from 60 reviews, and reviewers praise the editor and the support. A TechRadar review from February 2026 points to the same two things, easy for writers and a high cost.

The real limitation is that it supports a writing team more than it replaces one. Drafts are generated one at a time against a monthly allowance of 20, tone is set per draft, and its public pages show no CMS publishing, scheduled publishing, bulk generation, public API, or published security attestations. Price is the most common reservation in reviews, especially for smaller teams.

Byword

Byword is a self-serve AI article writer from Byword AI Ltd in London, launched in 2022 and rebuilt as v2 in January 2026. It is built for SEO teams, agencies, and niche-site publishers who want a high volume of search-oriented articles and are happy to edit and fact-check the output. You give it a keyword, title, or template, and it researches, drafts, adds internal links and images, and publishes to a connected CMS.

The standout is volume. Campaigns take lists of keywords or titles, and programmatic templates fill variables from CSV data to build pages in the hundreds or thousands. Pricing is public, one credit is one article, and unused credits roll over and never expire.

The real limitation is on the tracking and trust side. I found no native AI answer tracking in its public material, and no SOC 2, ISO 27001, or SSO on its pages. Independent reviews are few and mixed: 3.5/5 on G2 from 3 reviews and 2.8/5 on Trustpilot from 7, against 5.0 on Capterra Ireland and Product Hunt from one and two reviews. Complaints, mostly from 2023 to 2025, mention repetitive passages, poor link choices, and WordPress formatting problems.

DeepSmith: the alternative that tracks AI answers and writes the articles

Clearscope and Byword each cover one side of the job. Clearscope tracks AI mentions, but its writing is guided drafting one piece at a time, and its public pages show no publishing or scheduling. Byword generates and publishes at volume, but its AI visibility is a partial link to a separate product, so it can't tell you which prompts you are losing. A team that wants both ends up buying two tools and carrying the findings from one to the other by hand.

DeepSmith is one platform for AI search analytics and content production. It checks the questions you define on a schedule across the AI engines your plan covers and reports mention rate, citation rate, share of voice, and sentiment, plus the pages AI actually cites and which competitor pages win citations for your prompts. That data feeds Opportunity Agents, which return content ideas with the data point that justifies each one attached. From there the Writer turns a planned idea into a finished article, researched, linked internally and externally, with a cover image and publish-ready metadata, grounded in your Deep IQ brand context so voice and product claims stay consistent.

Autowrite takes it hands-off: you configure an article when you plan it, and it writes itself on the scheduled date and lands in Produced Content. You review, edit, and publish straight to WordPress, Webflow, Strapi, Sanity, or Contentful, or to your own webhooks.

The cost is a fixed monthly article allowance on public plans. Pro is $99 a month ($80 billed annually) for 20 articles, 50 tracked prompts, 5 seats, and ChatGPT tracking. Grow is $199 ($160 annually) for 40 articles, 100 prompts, 7 seats, and ChatGPT plus Perplexity. Scale is $399 ($299 annually) for 90 articles, 200 prompts, 10 seats, and ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini. Enterprise is custom and covers all ten engines. There are no long-term contracts and a 7-day free trial. DeepSmith's plans don't include a SERP term-scoring editor like Clearscope's, and the loop above is how it goes after the same ranking and citation goals. It has 4.8/5 on G2 and is SOC 2, GDPR and ISO certified.

Pricing per article and plan value

On Clearscope vs Byword pricing per article, Byword is the more transparent and the cheaper per generated article, while Clearscope is the better value if you mainly want grading and tracking for articles your team writes.

Byword's math is simple. Starter is $99 a month for 25 articles, about $3.96 each, and extra credits cost $3.50. Standard is $299 for 80 articles (about $3.74 each, extras $3.00) and Scale is $999 for 300 (about $3.33, extras $2.50). Annual billing brings the monthly equivalents to $83, $249, and $833. Credits roll over, and a free account starts with 5 articles. Per-article credits are one example of the move toward usage-based pricing in AI tools, while Clearscope's flat plan follows the older subscription model. The Unlimited plan is $1,999 a month as a platform fee for teams past 500 articles a month, and you supply your own model keys.

Here is what that looks like at a few volumes, using the published monthly prices and my own arithmetic.

Byword extra credits at $3.50 on Starter. Clearscope's Draft allowance is 20 a month on both plans. As of September 2026.

Clearscope's price doesn't move with how many articles you write, because its limits are on other things: 20 Drafts, 20 or 50 Topic Explorations, 50 or 300 monitored pages, and 50 or 300 tracked queries. Used only for Drafts, Essentials works out to about $6.45 each, though that ignores everything else in the plan. Moving from Essentials to Business roughly triples the price without adding Drafts, since both include 20. What the extra $270 buys is more tracked queries, more pages, more Topic Explorations, and a dedicated account manager. Credits reset each month on monthly plans and don't roll over. Monthly plans have no minimum contract.

For the full cost per article, add the editing and review time around the tool, which the TCO of AI content workflows covers.

Seats differ too. Clearscope has unlimited users on every plan. Byword's Free and Starter plans are solo, Standard includes 3 seats (up to 5 at $25 each extra), and Scale includes 10 (up to 25 at $20 each extra).

What DeepSmith does: it prices the pair of jobs together. Pro, Grow, and Scale include 20, 40, or 90 articles a month and the AI visibility tracking that tells you what to write, with 5, 7, or 10 seats, so one plan covers the tracker and the writer.

Writing and optimization

Byword is the stronger option for generating articles, and Clearscope is the stronger option for grading ones your writers wrote.

Clearscope's grading is term-based. It scrapes the top-ranking pages for a query, scores each term from 1 to 10 for importance, and updates the Content Grade live as the writer uses them. It also suggests internal links, and Content Inventory flags decaying pages from Search Console data. Its drafting writes in five languages, and brand voice is set per draft from a writing sample or a published page rather than stored.

Byword writes a full article from a keyword in about 60 to 90 seconds, in 47 languages by its pricing page, with 2 to 3 images, schema, and sitemap-based internal links of 1 to 12 per article. Voice can be trained from your own files, and a knowledge base is retrieved during generation. It claims a live SEO score across 147 factors, but its own Surfer comparison page calls its scoring implicit and gives Surfer the deeper competitive analysis, so I'd treat Clearscope as the deeper grader. Byword also advises fact-checking the output.

What DeepSmith does: the Writer builds SEO and AEO structure into the draft instead of grading it afterwards. Keyword coverage, heading structure, schema markup, internal linking, and metadata are part of the writing pipeline, and Deep IQ supplies the voice, persona, and product facts every run follows.

AI visibility tracking

Clearscope wins this one, because Byword has no native tracker.

Clearscope's Query Tracking reports mention percentage per query across ChatGPT and Gemini on the pricing page, with Claude named on its product pages, so plan-level coverage is not fully clear. Each query shows a 21-response rolling average, a 90-day trend, and the three latest answers word for word, against up to five competitor domains. Essentials tracks 50 queries and Business 300. How it collects the answers isn't published.

Byword links its AI visibility feature to Trakkr, a separate product, and only its MCP docs mention citation data, with no engines named. Its optimization of content for AI answers is likewise only partly documented.

What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith tracks mention rate, citation rate, and share of voice per prompt, with full answer history, and shows which of your pages are cited and who wins the citations you don't. Pro covers ChatGPT, Grow adds Perplexity, Scale adds Gemini, and Enterprise covers all ten engines.

Publishing and automation

Byword wins this one.

It publishes to WordPress, Webflow, Ghost, HubSpot, and Medium, with scheduled generation and auto-publish, a REST API on Standard and Scale, an MCP server, and Zapier and webhook connections. Campaigns run about 3 articles in parallel. Shopify and Make are listed as available on one page and coming soon in its docs, so confirm them before you buy.

Clearscope puts its recommendations inside Google Docs and WordPress through an add-on and a plugin, which helps a writer but doesn't publish. No scheduling, API, or MCP server appears in its public pages.

From insight to action

Neither tool closes the loop from what AI says to a published page, so this one is a tie.

Clearscope flags queries where competitors are mentioned and you are not, then hands the job to a writer. Byword starts from keywords and templates, so what it writes is driven by search research rather than by what AI engines say about you.

What DeepSmith does: the loop is one system. Opportunity Agents read your visibility data and your Content Map, return ideas with their evidence attached, and the New Ideas backlog feeds Planned Content, where Autowrite writes on schedule and Produced Content publishes to your CMS. Every idea carries the data point behind it, so you can defend the backlog instead of guessing at it.

Which should you choose

• DeepSmith fits a content or marketing team that wants to see where it is missing from AI answers and produce the articles that close the gap in the same place, on a published price with a fixed monthly article allowance and a free trial.
• Clearscope fits a team with strong writers that wants term-based grading and AI mention tracking, with unlimited users, and doesn't need generation at volume or CMS publishing.
• Byword fits an SEO team or agency that wants high-volume generated articles and programmatic pages published to its CMS at a per-article rate, and will do its own tracking elsewhere.

If you want to go deeper on either one, there is a Clearscope vs DeepSmith comparison for the grading side. The Byword vs DeepSmith comparison covers the generation side.

For most readers deciding between Clearscope or Byword, the question is whether you write or generate. If you write, Clearscope. If you generate, Byword. If you want to know what to write from AI answers and have it produced for you, DeepSmith.

Ready to see it with your own data? Start a DeepSmith free trial and get real tracking data and real drafts before you pay.