Frase vs Koala: Is Google AI Overviews Tracking Enough?

Frase and Koala both plan, write and publish SEO articles, but they split on AI answers. Frase tracks ChatGPT, Google AI, Perplexity, Claude and Gemini every day, while Koala only checks Google AI Overviews when you ask it to. Koala starts cheaper and suits publishers running many brands. DeepSmith is a strong alternative if you want tracking and writing on one self-serve plan, where each gap in AI answers becomes an evidence-backed idea and then a publish-ready article.

If you are choosing between Frase vs Koala AI, the writing side is closer than it looks, since both research, draft, optimize and publish to your CMS. The bigger difference is Frase vs Koala AI visibility tracking, meaning how much of the AI answer picture you can actually see. Frase checks five engines on a schedule, and Koala checks one engine on demand. Which one you need depends on how much of your traffic you expect to come from AI answers outside Google. DeepSmith sits next to both as a platform that tracks AI answers and writes the content that closes the gaps.

Frase vs Koala: the short answer

• Choose DeepSmith if you want AI visibility tracking and article production on one self-serve plan from $99/mo, with tracking that grows from ChatGPT on Pro to all ten named engines on Enterprise and gaps that turn into scheduled articles.
• Choose Frase if you want daily tracking across up to five engines included on every plan, plus SEO and GEO scoring, from $49/mo ($39/mo billed yearly).
• Choose Koala if you write at high volume for one brand or many, from $25/mo up to $2,000/mo for 75 brands, and an on-demand Google AI Overviews check is all the AI visibility you need.

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 researches, briefs, drafts, scores, publishes and then monitors content. It was founded in 2016 and bought by Copysmith in 2022. It is built for content marketers, small in-house teams and agencies who want research, writing, optimization, CMS publishing and basic AI visibility tracking in one tool at a public price.

The standout is breadth. A single plan covers SERP research and briefs, an editor with a live SEO score and a separate GEO score, site audits, publishing to WordPress, Webflow, Sanity, Wix or its own FraseCMS, and Content Guard, which watches pages for ranking decay and drafts fixes. AI visibility tracking comes on every plan, daily, with cited URLs, share of voice against competitors and country targeting in 40+ countries.

The real limits are on the tracking and the team side. Engine coverage is narrow at lower tiers, since Starter tracks ChatGPT and Google AI, Perplexity needs Professional, and Claude and Gemini need Scale. Frase also does not say how it collects answers or which model versions it queries. Several team features, including the content calendar and internal linking suggestions, start at Professional.

Reviewers on G2 give it 4.8/5 from 310 reviews and Capterra gives it 4.8/5 from 335, checked in September 2026. They praise research speed. Trustpilot is lower at 3.5/5 from 63 reviews, with complaints about support, refunds, usage limits and uneven AI writing quality.

Koala

Koala is a self-serve AI SEO content platform run by F5 Media, LLC, and it sells six products in one subscription. The main ones are Brand DNA, a per-brand knowledge base paired with an SEO agent that reads Search Console, and KoalaWriter, which generates long-form articles in eight types. It is aimed at bloggers, affiliate and niche publishers, local businesses and agencies who want high-volume production at a public price.

The standout is how much it gives you per dollar at the low end and how far it scales across brands. Pricing runs from $25/mo for one brand to $2,000/mo for 75 brands, with bulk writing from a keyword list, KoalaLinks for site-wide internal links, and an API and a 62-tool MCP server on every paid plan.

The real limit is the AI side. Koala says it helps you get cited in Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude, but the tools it documents only check whether Google AI Overviews cite a domain, on demand, with no recurring tracking or answer history. Key features such as the SEO scoring editor and Deep Research start at Professional, and the plan metering mixes a word allowance with shared credits that expire monthly.

Capterra shows 4.5/5 from 70 reviews, and G2 shows 4.5/5 from only 2. Reviewers like the fast, SEO-structured drafts. Trustpilot is 3/5 from 22 reviews, with complaints about slow support, credit expiry and refunds, and some reviewers say drafts read as robotic and need editing.

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

Frase tracks five engines and Koala checks one, and both then lean on Search Console data and a plan you build to decide what to write. DeepSmith is built to decide it from the AI answers themselves. It tracks how AI engines answer questions about your brand, finds where you are invisible or losing, and produces the on-brand article that closes the gap, all from the same data.

On the tracking side, DeepSmith reports mention rate, citation rate and share of voice, with a per-platform breakdown, a competitor leaderboard, the pages of yours that AI actually cites, and the competitor pages winning citations for your prompts. Coverage rises by plan. Pro tracks ChatGPT, Grow adds Perplexity, Scale adds Gemini, and Enterprise covers all ten named engines: ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Grok, Meta AI, Microsoft Copilot and DeepSeek.

The production side starts from that data. Opportunity Agents read your visibility results and return content ideas, each carrying the specific data point that justifies it, so the backlog can be defended instead of guessed at. An idea moves into Planned Content, and Autowrite can write it on a set date with no one in the app, using the persona, voice, content type and link targets stored in Deep IQ. The Writer returns a finished article with research, internal and external links, a cover image and publish-ready metadata, and you can publish to WordPress, Webflow, Strapi, Sanity or Contentful, or to your own webhooks.

Plans are public. Pro is $99/mo ($80/mo billed yearly) with 20 articles, 50 tracked prompts and 5 seats, Grow is $199/mo with 40 articles and 100 prompts, and Scale is $399/mo with 90 articles and 200 prompts. There is a 7-day free trial and no long-term contract, and DeepSmith is SOC 2, GDPR and ISO certified and rated 4.8/5 on G2. Enterprise is custom. DeepSmith's plans don't include a SERP-based content score, and the Writer does the SEO work during creation instead.

Engine coverage

Frase wins on engine coverage, because it tracks five engines and Koala documents one. Frase's list is ChatGPT, Google AI, Perplexity, Claude and Gemini, gated by plan. One detail matters for anyone reading the title's question: Frase labels its first engine "Google AI" and does not say whether that means AI Overviews, AI Mode or both.

Koala's coverage is a single surface. Its agent and its MCP tools can check whether a Google AI Overview cites your domain for a keyword and compare competitor citations, at 1 to 3 credits a call through MCP. ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude appear in its marketing as optimization targets, and no measurement of them is described. That is useful for a quick audit and thin for a program, because a one-off check cannot show a trend.

How much this matters depends on where your buyers ask questions. If they use several AI tools, a Google-only view leaves part of the picture out, and the right call is to look at your own audience before deciding.

What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith tracks the engines your plan includes on a schedule and widens the set as you move up. Pro covers ChatGPT, Grow adds Perplexity, Scale adds Gemini, and Enterprise covers all ten named engines, including Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, Claude and Grok.

Tracking depth and data method

Frase wins on tracking depth. It queries prompts daily, alerts you when visibility changes, classifies prompts by buying stage, records cited URLs and citation position, and shows share of voice against competitors you choose. It also publishes weekly industry benchmarks per engine and keeps history that ranges from 30 days on Starter to 24 months on Enterprise. Prompt allowances are 50, 200 and 500 on Starter, Professional and Scale.

The weak spot is method. Neither Frase's pages nor the third-party research say whether answers come from official APIs or consumer interfaces, which model versions are queried, or how many runs are sampled per prompt. The same gap exists at Koala, where it is not stated how AI Overview results are collected. AI answers vary from run to run, so a score is easier to trust when you know how many samples sit behind it, and neither vendor shows that.

Koala's checks are live calls against Google results, with no schedule, no answer history and no share of voice. You get an answer to a question you asked today.

What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith reports mention rate, citation rate and share of voice with trends, and keeps per-prompt mention and citation rates with full answer history. The Pages view shows which of your pages AI cites and the prompts driving those citations, and the competitor view shows which competitor pages win citations and on which platforms.

Writing and SEO optimization

In Koala AI vs Frase, this one is a tie with different strengths. Frase's editor scores a draft live against the pages ranking for the query and adds a GEO score, and its research flow builds structured briefs from the ranking pages, People Also Ask and forums. It writes in 70+ languages and offers 16 content types, plus programmatic page families.

Koala's KoalaWriter generates full articles in eight types, from blog posts and listicles to Amazon affiliate roundups and topical clusters. It grounds each article in a per-brand knowledge base, writes in 100+ languages, and Deep Research gathers sources before drafting on Professional and above. Its SEO Content Editor grades a draft against entity coverage from the ranking pages, and bulk mode produces articles from a keyword list.

Reviewers describe the same weakness on both sides, with Frase drawing complaints about occasionally irrelevant or inaccurate AI writing and Koala drawing remarks that drafts can read as robotic and need fact-checking. Whether you pick Frase or Koala AI, plan on an editing pass.

Pricing and value

Koala is cheaper to start, and Frase is easier to read. Frase's Starter is $49/mo ($39/mo billed yearly) for 10 articles, 50 audit pages and 50 tracked prompts. Professional is $129/mo ($103/mo yearly) for 40 articles and 200 prompts, and Scale is $299/mo ($239/mo yearly) for 100 articles and 500 prompts. Pay-as-you-go overage on higher plans is $5 per extra article on Professional and $4 on Scale, and it is off by default.

Koala has nine public tiers. Starter is $25/mo for 45,000 words and 500 credits, Professional is $49, Boost is $99, and the top tier is $2,000/mo for 75 brands and 10,000,000 words. Articles draw on the word allowance, which premium models spend at 2x or 3x, while chat, images, links, the agent and MCP research share a credit pool that expires monthly. Koala states a 20% saving for annual billing, but the annual prices were not captured, so none are listed here. For an agency with many brands, the per-brand structure is a real advantage.

What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith puts tracking and production in the same price. Pro at $99/mo includes 20 articles, 50 tracked prompts and 5 seats, and the plan carries the whole loop from visibility data to a finished article, with a 7-day free trial to test it.

From insight to action

Frase edges this one for AI-answer work, because its tracking sits next to the rest of the workflow. Its Content Opportunities list combines Search Console data, competitor gaps, decaying pages and visitor questions, and its Agent can research, draft, score and line up publishing, with approval steps and per-content-type autonomy. Content Guard drafts fixes for pages that are losing ground.

Koala's agent reads Search Console and Analytics, plans a calendar, and hands topics to KoalaWriter. Content Calendar Autopilot writes and publishes an approved calendar on a cadence from Boost at $99/mo. Its AI Search Focus mode recommends extraction-friendly rewrites and schema, but those recommendations rest on a Google-only check.

What DeepSmith does: In DeepSmith, a gap in AI answers becomes an Opportunity Agent idea that carries its own evidence, such as the tracked prompt and the competitor page winning it. The idea moves into Planned Content, and Autowrite produces a publish-ready article on its date, linked through the Content Map and written in the voice stored in Deep IQ. You review it in Produced Content or let it publish.

Which should you choose

Between Frase or Koala AI, the deciding question is how much AI-answer tracking you need. Here is how the three fit.

• DeepSmith fits marketing teams and agencies that want to see where the brand appears in AI answers and also produce the content that changes it, on one plan with a public price, a free trial and tracking that widens as the plan grows.
• Frase fits solo writers, in-house teams and small agencies who want SEO and GEO scoring and daily tracking on up to five engines, and who are comfortable with a smaller engine list on Starter.
• Koala fits publishers, affiliate sites and agencies producing a lot of articles across many brands, where a periodic Google AI Overviews check covers the AI side.

Ready to see tracking and production on one plan? Start a DeepSmith free trial and run it against your own prompts.