Frase and Semrush Content Toolkit (ContentShake AI) both turn a topic into a finished article, but they suit different people. Frase adds AI answer tracking, bulk generation and scheduled publishing from $39 a month billed yearly. The Semrush Content Toolkit gives Semrush users a guided topic-to-WordPress workflow at $60 a month billed annually and does not track AI answers. DeepSmith is a strong alternative for teams that want to decide what to write from AI answers and competitor gaps, then have the same platform write and publish it.
If you already use Semrush, the Frase vs Semrush Content Toolkit choice mostly comes down to how much you value staying inside one suite. The Semrush Content Toolkit runs on Semrush search data and walks you from topic to a WordPress post. Frase covers more of the work around the article, including tracking, bulk production and publishing on a schedule. DeepSmith sits next to both for teams that want the writing plan to come from what AI engines say about their brand.
Frase vs Semrush Content Toolkit: the short answer
- Choose DeepSmith if you want your content plan to come from tracked AI answers and competitor gaps, with the same platform writing and publishing the articles, from $80 a month billed annually.
- Choose Frase if you want AI visibility tracking, bulk generation and scheduled publishing in one self-serve tool, starting at $39 a month billed yearly.
- Choose Semrush Content Toolkit if you already work in Semrush and want a guided topic-to-WordPress workflow on Semrush data at one fixed price of $60 a month billed annually.
Comparison table
| Criterion | DeepSmith | Frase | Semrush Content Toolkit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Entry price, monthly billing | $99/mo (Pro) | $49/mo (Starter) | Not listed |
| Entry price, billed annually | $80/mo | $39/mo | $60/mo (Base) |
| Articles per month at entry tier | 20 | 10 | 10,000, with 5 SEO-boosted |
| Free trial | 7 days | 7 days, no card | 7 days |
| Brand voice and knowledge grounding | Yes | Yes | Partial |
| SERP-based content scoring | - | Yes | Yes |
| Internal linking | Yes | Yes | Not listed |
| AI visibility tracking | Yes | Yes | No |
| Bulk generation | Yes | Yes | Not listed |
| Scheduled publishing | Yes | Yes | Not listed |
| CMS publishing | Yes | Yes | Yes, WordPress |
| API access | Yes, read-only | Yes | Not listed |
| SOC 2 | Yes | Yes, vendor claim | Not listed |
| Review rating | 4.8/5 on G2 | 4.8/5 on G2 | 7.2/10 on Info-Tech SoftwareReviews |
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 a topic, builds a brief, drafts the article, scores it and publishes it. It also keeps watching the page afterward. It is built for content marketers, small in-house teams and agencies who want that whole loop in one self-serve tool at a public price. Plans run from Starter at $39 a month billed yearly ($49 monthly) to Scale at $239 a month billed yearly, with Enterprise quoted.
The standout is how much sits in one product. Research and briefs, an editor with live SEO and GEO scores, site audits, publishing to WordPress, Webflow, Sanity and Wix, and daily AI visibility tracking are all on the vendor's pages, and an API and MCP server come on every plan. Content Guard drafts fixes for pages that are losing rank or traffic.
The limits are mostly about tiers and polish. Starter tracks only ChatGPT and Google AI, so Perplexity needs Professional, and Claude and Gemini need Scale. Frase has not said how it collects AI answers or which model versions it queries. Much of the current product was rebuilt in February 2026, so long-run evidence is thin.
Review sites are mostly positive. Reviewers on G2 give Frase 4.8/5 from 310 reviews, checked September 2026. Capterra shows 4.8/5 from 335 reviews. They praise research speed and time saved in planning. Complaints cover uneven AI writing quality, editor lag, usage limits and mixed support experiences, and Trustpilot sits lower at 3.5/5 from 63 reviews.
Semrush Content Toolkit
The Semrush Content Toolkit is the product formerly sold as ContentShake AI. Semrush split its platform into separate toolkits in May 2025, and the old name now redirects to the new one. It is a guided workflow for individual marketers, small teams and SEO beginners who already use Semrush or are open to it. Many older reviews still use the ContentShake name.
The workflow runs in a fixed order. Topic Finder suggests topics with search volume, keyword difficulty and intent from Semrush data. The SEO Brief Generator builds a brief from the top-ranking pages, and the AI Article Generator writes the draft. A Content Optimizer then scores it for SEO and AI search criteria, and repurposing turns the article into social posts and emails. Publishing goes to WordPress, Mailchimp and Semrush Social Poster. The standout is the grounding in Semrush data, offered on one public plan called Base.
The limits are plain. Base includes five SEO-boosted articles a month, and ten more cost $30. Semrush's own pages do not document bulk generation, scheduled article publishing, an internal linking tool or a Content Toolkit API. Most important for this comparison, the toolkit does not track brand mentions or citations in AI answers. Semrush sells that as a separate AI Visibility Toolkit. That keeps the toolkit focused on production.
The product-specific review base is small. Info-Tech SoftwareReviews lists it at 7.2/10 from 7 reviews. The G2 and Capterra scores people often quote cover the whole Semrush suite.
DeepSmith: the alternative that finds what to write from AI answers
Both tools above start from a keyword or a topic. For a team that wants to be cited in AI answers, the harder question comes earlier, which is which topics to write at all. Frase has a ranked Content Opportunities list and tracks prompts. The Semrush Content Toolkit suggests topics from Semrush data, and tracking is a separate purchase. Neither one is built around a plan that comes from what engines say about your brand and who they cite instead.
DeepSmith is an AI search analytics and content production platform in one. The AEO module tracks mention rate, citation rate and share of voice across the engines on your plan, shows which of your pages AI cites, and lists which competitor pages win citations for your prompts. The Content Map crawls your site and your competitors' sites onto one topic taxonomy, so coverage gaps and untapped topics become a measurement. Opportunity Agents read that data and return ideas, and each idea carries the data point that justifies it, such as the competitor page winning citations and the gap on your own site.
Planning and production happen in the same platform. From there the Writer turns a planned idea into a finished article, grounded in your Deep IQ brand context, internally and externally linked, with a cover image and publish-ready metadata. Autowrite can write it on its scheduled date and hand it over for review or take it all the way to published. Articles go to WordPress, Webflow, Strapi, Sanity or Contentful, or to your own webhooks.
Plans are Pro at $99 a month ($80 billed annually) with 20 articles and 50 tracked prompts, Grow at $199 ($160 annually) with 40 articles and 100 prompts, and Scale at $399 ($299 annually) with 90 articles and 200 prompts. Enterprise is custom. There is a 7-day free trial and no long-term contract.
Pricing and value
Frase is the cheaper entry point between the two. Starter is $39 a month billed yearly, or $49 monthly, against $60 a month billed annually for Semrush Content Toolkit Base, whose month-to-month price is not listed. What you get for the money differs a lot. Starter covers 10 articles, 50 AI visibility prompts and a single seat. Base lists 10,000 articles a month on its pricing page, though a Semrush help article calls standard articles unlimited, and only 5 of them get the SEO boost. Extra users on Base cost $20 a month each.
Higher Frase plans scale in clear steps. Professional is $103 a month billed yearly with 40 articles and 200 prompts, and Scale is $239 with 100 articles and 500 prompts. Pay-as-you-go overage is off by default. Frase's 7-day trial needs no card, while Semrush says the first payment is charged automatically when its trial ends unless you cancel.
What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith puts tracking and production on one plan with a published price. Pro at $80 a month billed annually includes 20 articles, 50 tracked prompts and five seats, and the 7-day trial gives you real data and real drafts before you pay.
Research, writing and optimization
On this axis Frase has the deeper toolset. Its research flow reads the ranking pages, gathers questions from People Also Ask and forums, flags competitor gaps and ends in a brief. The Evidence tab pulls stats and quotes with sources, and you approve which ones the writer can use. The editor shows live SEO and GEO scores. Semrush Content Toolkit has a lighter version of the same path. Briefs and boosts use real-time SERP data, and the Content Optimizer scores drafts on SEO and AI search checks. It does not document live fact or citation research while drafting.
Brand context also differs. Frase stores company, audience and value proposition details in a Brand Hub and draws on them while writing. Semrush Content Toolkit builds up to 50 brand voices from writing samples, but no product-fact store is documented.
What DeepSmith does: The Writer runs every draft against stored Deep IQ context, meaning product, persona, voice, content type, word range and link targets. It researches each article and applies keyword coverage, heading structure, schema, internal links and metadata while it writes, so the output arrives publish-ready instead of waiting on a separate optimization pass.
AI answer tracking
Frase wins this one clearly, because Semrush Content Toolkit does not do it. Frase tracks prompts daily with alerts, classifies them by buying stage, shows cited URLs, share of voice against competitors and sentiment, and lets you target more than 40 countries. The depth depends on the plan. Starter covers ChatGPT and Google AI with 50 prompts, Professional adds Perplexity with 200 prompts, and Scale adds Claude and Gemini with 500 prompts. The Semrush Content Toolkit optimizes content for AI search with checks like authorship and Q&A formatting, but it does not monitor whether AI engines mention or cite you. Semrush offers that in its separate AI Visibility Toolkit.
In a Semrush Content Toolkit vs Frase decision, this means the Content Toolkit tells you how to shape an article for AI search and then stops. You would need another product to see whether it worked.
What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith tracks mention rate, citation rate, share of voice and sentiment across the engines on your plan, with Pro on ChatGPT, Grow adding Perplexity, Scale adding Gemini and Enterprise covering all ten. Each tracked prompt keeps its answer history, and the Pages view shows which of your pages AI actually cites.
Publishing and automation
Frase publishes to WordPress, Webflow, Sanity, Wix and its own FraseCMS, and it can schedule posts from a content calendar on Professional and up. A Frase Agent can run batches of up to 10 articles, and programmatic SEO builds whole page families. Its autonomy setting lets Frase publish a content type on its own once you switch it on. The pricing page says this is on every plan while another page says higher plans, and the two pages do not agree.
Semrush Content Toolkit publishes to WordPress, with up to 100 connected sites, plus Mailchimp and Semrush Social Poster for repurposed posts. Articles are generated one at a time, and unattended scheduled article publishing is not documented. Repurposed social and email posts can be scheduled after review.
What DeepSmith does: Autowrite writes each planned article on its date and lands it in Produced Content, or takes it all the way to published with no one in the app. Planning can be done one idea at a time or in bulk, and each article is limited only by the plan's monthly allowance.
From insight to action
This is where the three products differ most. Frase connects Search Console, competitor gaps, decaying pages and visitor questions into one ranked opportunity list, and Content Guard drafts fixes for pages losing traffic. That is a strong loop for Google search. Its AI visibility data sits beside that loop, and Frase does not say it turns tracked prompts into ideas. Semrush Content Toolkit has Topic Finder, which starts from a topic you supply, and a weekly topic refresh for saved lists. Its documented input is the starting topic and location, with no dedicated competitor gap report.
For a Semrush user the practical gap is the handoff. Visibility data lives in one product, topic ideas in another, and the article in a third.
What DeepSmith does: DeepSmith uses one set of data from tracking to publishing. Opportunity Agents can grow your AI visibility for a tracked prompt, turn mentions into citations, take a competitor's citations, or close an awareness, consideration or decision-stage gap against up to four competitors. Every idea keeps its evidence, so you can defend the backlog, and the work flows from tracking to publishing on the same plan. The Writer and Autowrite produce the articles.
Which should you choose
- DeepSmith fits marketing teams that want to know where they show up in AI answers, see which competitors win the citations, and turn those gaps into published articles without moving between tools. It covers tracking, planning, writing and publishing on one plan, with a 7-day free trial.
- Frase fits a Semrush user, or anyone, who wants AI visibility tracking, bulk generation and scheduled publishing in a single self-serve tool, and who is comfortable with plan limits and some editor friction that reviewers mention.
- Semrush Content Toolkit fits a Semrush user who wants a guided path from a topic to a WordPress post on Semrush data at one fixed price, and who plans to measure AI visibility somewhere else.
Start a DeepSmith free trial to see tracked AI answers and the content plan they produce for your own brand.
