Frase vs Byword: Do You Need AI Answer Tracking With Your Article Writer?

Frase and Byword both research, write and publish SEO articles, but Frase builds AI visibility tracking into every plan while Byword sells volume through per-article credits and programmatic templates. Frase suits teams that want one tool for writing and basic tracking, and Byword suits publishers who care most about article count. DeepSmith is a strong alternative for teams that want tracking and writing on one plan, where tracked AI answers turn into evidence-backed ideas and publish-ready articles.

If you are weighing Frase vs Byword, you are probably choosing an article writer, and the question underneath is whether you also need to see how AI engines answer questions about your brand. Frase includes that tracking on every plan. Byword describes itself as an article writer built for SEO at scale, and AI visibility is mostly something it points to a separate product for. We think the tracking question matters more than it first looks, so DeepSmith is placed in the comparison as a third option that does both jobs on one plan.

Frase vs Byword: the short answer

• Choose DeepSmith if you want to track how AI engines talk about your brand and produce the articles that close the gaps on one self-serve plan, with a fixed number of publish-ready articles each month (20, 40 or 90) and a free trial to test it.
• Choose Frase if you want SEO research, writing and AI visibility tracking in one tool at a low entry price, starting at $39 a month billed yearly.
• Choose Byword if your main goal is article volume, with campaigns, programmatic templates and plans that run from $99 a month for 25 articles up to an unlimited tier.

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

Frase

Frase is an SEO and AI-search content platform that covers research, briefs, drafting, scoring, publishing and monitoring in one product. It was founded in 2016 and acquired by Copysmith in 2022. It is built for content marketers, small in-house teams and agencies who want a public price and a self-serve tool, from solo users on Starter up to multi-site agencies on Scale.

The standout is how much sits inside one subscription. Frase scores a draft live against the pages ranking for a query and gives it a separate GEO score, publishes to WordPress, Webflow, Sanity, Wix or its own hosted CMS, and watches published pages for decay. AI visibility tracking runs daily on every plan, and an API and MCP server are included too. Monthly plans are Starter at $49, Professional at $129 and Scale at $299, with yearly billing bringing those to $39, $103 and $239.

The real limit is how far the tracking goes at lower tiers. Starter covers ChatGPT and Google AI, Perplexity needs Professional, and Claude and Gemini need Scale. Frase also does not say how it collects answers, which model versions it queries or how many runs it samples per prompt, so you cannot tell how steady the numbers are. Much of the current product was rebuilt in February 2026, which means independent long-run evidence is thin.

Reviewers on G2 rate Frase 4.8/5 across 310 reviews, and Capterra shows 4.8/5 across 335, both checked in September 2026. People praise fast research and briefs. The complaints are uneven AI writing quality, editor lag, usage limits and mixed support experiences, and Trustpilot sits lower at 3.5/5.

Byword

Byword is a self-serve AI article writer from London-based Byword AI Ltd, launched in late 2022 and relaunched as v2 in January 2026. It is built for SEO teams, content agencies and affiliate or niche-site publishers who want a high number of search-focused articles and are ready to edit and fact-check them. It describes itself as an article writer built for SEO at scale.

The standout is volume and how plainly it is priced. One credit buys one article, credits roll over, and the plans run from $99 a month for 25 articles to $999 for 300, plus a $1,999 platform fee for an Unlimited tier where you bring your own model keys. Campaigns take lists of keywords or titles, and programmatic templates fill variables from a CSV to build hundreds or thousands of pages. Every account starts with 5 free articles and no card.

The limit that matters for this comparison is that Byword has no native AI-answer tracking. The pricing grid lists no monitored engines, its site links AI visibility to a separate product called Trakkr, and only its MCP documentation mentions AI-search citation data. It also documents no security certifications.

Independent reviews are few and mixed. G2 shows 3.5/5 from 3 reviews and Trustpilot 2.8/5 from 7. Reviewers like how fast it produces SEO drafts, while older complaints mention repetitive writing, poor link choices and WordPress formatting problems.

DeepSmith: the alternative that tracks and writes

Frase also tracks AI answers, so the useful question is how the tracking connects to what you publish next. In Frase the tracker and the writer sit in the same product, and the Frase Agent can take a request through research, drafting and publishing. In Byword there is no tracker to connect. DeepSmith is built around the connection itself, with tracking and production working from the same data.

On the tracking side, DeepSmith reports mention rate, citation rate, share of voice and sentiment, with a trend over time and a per-engine breakdown. A competitor leaderboard shows who wins the citations for your prompts and on which exact pages, and a pages view shows which of your own pages AI actually cites. Discover Prompts builds a starter set of questions from your product, persona and buyer-stage context, so you are not starting from a blank list.

The gap shows up in what happens after you see a weak spot. Opportunity Agents read your visibility data and your Content Map, then return content ideas with the reason attached. Each idea carries the specific data point behind it, such as a competitor page winning citations for a prompt you track, so you can defend the backlog instead of guessing at it. Ideas move into Content Studio, where the Writer turns a planned idea into a finished article that is researched, linked, given a cover image and metadata, and grounded in your Deep IQ brand context.

Autowrite then does the production work on a schedule, so a planned article writes itself on its date and lands in Produced Content for review, or goes out to WordPress, Webflow, Strapi, Sanity or Contentful. The volume is a fixed monthly allowance rather than credits: 20 articles on Pro at $99 a month, 40 on Grow at $199 and 90 on Scale at $399, or $80, $160 and $299 billed annually. Tracking engines rise by plan, with ChatGPT on Pro, Perplexity added on Grow and Gemini added on Scale, and Enterprise covers all ten engines. DeepSmith's plans don't include a SERP-based scoring screen, and the same Writer builds keyword coverage, heading structure and AEO formatting into the article as it is written. The 7-day free trial gives you real tracking data and real drafts before you pay, and there are no long-term contracts.

Pricing and value

In a Byword vs Frase price check, Frase is the cheaper way in, and Byword is the cheaper way to get articles once you are past a few dozen a month.

On monthly billing, Frase Starter works out to about $4.90 an article ($49 for 10), while Byword Starter is about $3.96 ($99 for 25). Further up, Frase Professional gives 40 articles for $129 and Scale gives 100 for $299, which is roughly $3.23 and $2.99 an article, and Byword Standard and Scale come to about $3.74 and $3.33. So at the top of Frase's published plans the per-article price is a little lower than Byword's. Byword reaches much higher counts, though, and its extra credits cost $3.50, $3.00 and $2.50 depending on plan, against $5 and $4 for Frase's optional overage on Professional and Scale.

The two also bill differently. Byword is a credit system, where one credit is one article and unused credits roll over. Frase gives a monthly allowance with usage caps on articles, audit pages and AI prompts, and its pay-as-you-go overage is off by default. Frase's Starter plan simply stops at its limit.

The Frase price includes tracking, and the Byword price does not, so the cheaper writer can end up costing more once you add a tracker. For a team that needs both, I would compare the full cost of writing plus tracking, not the writing price alone.

What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith bundles tracking and production into one published price, from $99 a month for 20 articles and 50 tracked prompts to $399 for 90 articles and 200 prompts. The allowance is a number you can plan a calendar around, and the seats come with it (5 on Pro, 7 on Grow, 10 on Scale).

Volume and programmatic pages

Byword wins on raw volume. Its campaigns process about 3 articles at a time, and its own estimate is roughly 100 articles in about 40 minutes with images on. Programmatic templates take a CSV and produce 100 to 10,000 or more pages, and Byword lists more than 50 templates for location, versus, alternatives and integration pages. The Unlimited plan removes the credit cap altogether.

Frase does programmatic work too. It finds page families such as location, comparison and integration pages, drafts each one, scores it and publishes the approved batch, and its Agent can write up to 10 articles in one run. Every page counts against the monthly article allowance, so the ceiling is 100 articles a month on Scale unless you are on Enterprise.

If your plan is thousands of templated pages, Byword is built for it. If your plan is a steady few dozen articles a month that each earn a place, the extra headroom matters less than the quality of each piece.

What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith is aimed at articles that each have a reason to exist. Autowrite runs against the stored persona, voice, content type and link targets, and the Content Map shows the topics where competitors publish and you do not, so the schedule fills with pieces tied to a real gap. There is more on that approach in programmatic editorial vs programmatic SEO.

AI visibility tracking

On Frase vs Byword AI visibility, Frase wins clearly, because Byword has no native tracker.

Frase tracks a set of prompts every day and alerts you when visibility changes. It reports appearance, competitor share of voice, platform breakdowns, sentiment and results by buying stage, and it can target 40 or more countries per prompt. Prompt allowances are 50, 200 and 500 across Starter, Professional and Scale, with engines widening from two to five as you move up. Frase suggests starting with 10 to 20 prompts and watching for 2 to 4 weeks before you read patterns, which is sensible advice for any tracker. The limits are the narrow engine list on Starter and the missing detail on how answers are collected.

Byword's record shows partial coverage at best. Its MCP server can read AI-search citation data, and the site links to Trakkr, but the pages give no monitored engines and no tracking method. If AI visibility matters to you, plan on a separate tool alongside Byword.

What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith tracks mention rate, citation rate, share of voice and sentiment per prompt and per engine, and keeps the full answer history so you can read exactly what an engine said. It also shows which of your pages are cited and which competitor pages win the citations you want. If you want a plain explanation of what those numbers mean, see AI visibility metrics that matter and how to measure citation rate.

Optimization and research depth

Frase has the deeper optimization toolkit. It scores drafts live against ranking pages, adds a GEO score judged against a content-type rubric, audits sites and drafts fixes for decaying pages through Content Guard. Byword has a live SEO score and a refresh tool that reads Search Console, but its own comparison page with Surfer calls its scoring implicit and concedes that Surfer's SERP analyzer gives deeper competitive intelligence. Byword's feature page claims a 147-factor score, so the pages do not fully agree with each other.

On research, both tools build keyword and SERP views. Byword adds its own keyword explorer and says its index holds 2.4 billion keywords, which is its claim and not something I could check. Frase pulls questions from People Also Ask, forums and answer engines and ends in a structured brief.

For optimizing content toward AI answers, Frase documents a method at a high level and Byword documents none outside MCP prompts. How well either one works in practice is a vendor claim, and neither has published outcome data you could rely on.

What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith builds keyword coverage, heading structure, internal linking, metadata and citation-ready formatting into the article during writing, so the draft arrives close to publishable instead of needing a scoring pass afterward. Output is publish-ready, not a first draft to rescue.

From insight to action

Frase gets from tracking to a new article fastest inside one screen, and Byword has no tracking to start from.

In Frase, Content Opportunities combines competitor gaps, Search Console data, decaying pages and visitor questions into one ranked list, and the Agent can research, draft and line up a publish from a plain-language request. Publishing goes to four CMS options, and each content type starts in review until you switch on autonomy. In Byword, you bring the keyword or title yourself, or use Campaign Ideas built from your domain, and the article goes out to WordPress, Webflow, Ghost, HubSpot or Medium. Nothing in the loop reads AI answers.

Frase's list is built from search data, competitor gaps, decaying pages and visitor questions.

What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith starts from the AI answer. An Opportunity Agent can target getting cited for a tracked prompt, turning mentions into citations or taking a competitor's citations, and each idea comes with the data point that justifies it. Autowrite writes it on the planned date, and you review it in Produced Content or let it publish. Repurpose adds social posts to every finished article, and the Apps Library turns it into LinkedIn, X, newsletter and other channel versions. If you want to see how the track-and-write approach compares across the market, this roundup of tools that both track and write lays it out.

Which should you choose

• DeepSmith: you are a content or marketing team, or an agency, that wants to see where AI engines mention and cite you, find the gaps, and publish on-brand articles to close them, all on one self-serve plan with a published price and a 7-day free trial.
• Frase: you want one tool for SEO research, optimization and writing, with tracking included, and you are comfortable starting on two engines at $39 a month billed yearly. It fits agencies with several client sites on Professional or Scale.
• Byword: you publish at high volume, such as programmatic or affiliate sites, you will edit and fact-check each article yourself, and you are happy to pair it with a separate tracker.

If you are still deciding between Frase or Byword and nothing else, the split is simple. Frase is the better choice when tracking and optimization matter, and Byword is the better choice when the count of articles matters most. For a longer look at each tool's competitors, see the Frase alternatives and Byword alternatives roundups, or the direct DeepSmith vs Byword comparison.

Start a free DeepSmith trial to see your real tracking data and a first batch of drafts before you pay.