Surfer SEO and Semrush Content Toolkit (ContentShake AI) both now write content meant to get picked up in AI answers, but only one of them tells you whether it worked. Surfer's AI Tracker checks five engines per prompt and reports mention gaps and sentiment in the same account. The Content Toolkit optimizes for AI search inside its writing flow and stops there, so you would need a separate tool, or a separate Semrush purchase, to see whether any of it landed. DeepSmith ties both halves together in one system: it tracks which of your pages AI actually cites, then writes the pages that close the gap.
If you write content and want it to show up when someone asks ChatGPT or Perplexity a question in your space, you're probably choosing between Surfer SEO or Semrush Content Toolkit for AI search. Semrush still sells the product under its older name too, so the same decision sometimes gets framed as Surfer SEO vs ContentShake for AI search citations. Both tools now build AI-search guidance into how they score and optimize a draft. Where they split is what happens after you publish: Surfer keeps watching how AI engines answer, and the Content Toolkit hands that job to someone else. This piece looks at just that one job, content cited in AI answers, not the full feature comparison between the two.
Surfer SEO vs Semrush Content Toolkit for AI search: the short answer
- Choose DeepSmith if you want the same system to track which pages AI already cites and to write the pages that close the gaps it finds, without stitching two tools together.
- Choose Surfer SEO if you want AI-answer optimization and AI-answer tracking in one self-serve account, and you're fine with plan gating that limits engine coverage on cheaper tiers.
- Choose Semrush Content Toolkit if you already lean on Semrush's search data and want a single, simply priced plan for AI-assisted drafting and optimization, and you can track citations elsewhere.
Surfer SEO vs Semrush Content Toolkit for AI search citations, at a glance
| Criterion | DeepSmith | Surfer SEO | Semrush Content Toolkit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Entry price (monthly) | $99/mo (Pro) | $49/mo (Discovery, no AI tracking) | $60/mo (Base, billed yearly) |
| Free trial | Yes, 7 days | Yes, 7-day Pro trial | Yes, 7 days |
| Optimizes content to be cited in AI answers | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Tracks brand mentions or citations in AI answers | Yes | Yes | No |
| Engines tracked at once, top plan | 10, Enterprise | 5, Pro and up | Not listed |
| AI answer refresh frequency | - | Daily on Pro and up | Not listed |
| Brand voice or knowledge grounding | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Publishes directly to a CMS | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| API or MCP access | Yes | Yes | Not listed |
| Review rating | 4.8/5 on G2 | 4.8/5 on G2 | 4.4/5 on G2 (suite) |
Pricing and features as of September 2026, from each vendor's site and public reviews.
Surfer SEO in brief
Surfer SEO is a content optimization platform built around the Content Editor and its real-time Content Score, which grade a draft against both top-ranking pages and pages AI answers cite. It has added AI Tracker, which checks ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Mode, AI Overviews and Gemini for a set of prompts and reports mention gaps, sentiment and the sources AI is pulling from. Pricing runs from $49 a month up to $299, billed yearly, with a lot of plan gating: the cheapest plan tracks nothing in AI answers at all, and full five-engine tracking needs Pro or above. It suits SEO and content teams who want optimization and citation tracking under one self-serve login and don't mind paying up the plan ladder for the full picture. Reviewers rate it 4.8/5 on G2 and 4.9/5 on Capterra and praise the editor's guidance; the recurring complaint is that pricing and document credits get tight for smaller teams, and some AI suggestions feel formulaic.
Semrush Content Toolkit (ContentShake AI) in brief
The Semrush Content Toolkit, sold under the ContentShake AI name until Semrush split its platform into separate toolkits, is a guided workflow for finding topics, building SEO briefs, generating full articles and optimizing them against both Google and AI-search criteria, all grounded in Semrush's own keyword data. Its Content Optimizer checks a draft for structural things AI answers tend to favor, like clear authorship and question-and-answer formatting, alongside standard SEO items. One plan, Base, costs $60 a month billed annually, which makes it simple to buy for a solo marketer or a small team. What it does not do is watch how AI engines actually answer prompts about your brand afterward; that's a separate Semrush product, the AI Visibility Toolkit. It suits marketers who want one guided path from topic to published post at a flat price and are comfortable tracking citation results, if they track them at all, somewhere else.
DeepSmith: the alternative that tracks and writes
Surfer optimizes for AI answers and then checks whether it worked, which is a real strength, but it charges more for the checking as you go up the plan ladder, and the Content Toolkit skips the checking part entirely, pointing you at a different Semrush purchase if you want it. Neither ties the citation data it (or a sibling product) collects directly back into what gets written next inside the same account.
DeepSmith is built around that loop. AI Visibility tracks mention rate, citation rate and share of voice across ten AI engines, with a per-platform breakdown and a record of exactly which of your pages each engine is citing and for which prompts. That's not a separate report you have to reconcile with your content calendar. When a page is winning citations, or when a topic has no page at all, an Opportunity Agent turns that into a specific idea with the data point attached, and the Writer produces a publish-ready, AEO-formatted article from it, complete with internal links, a cover image and metadata. Autowrite can take a planned piece all the way to published with no one in the app that day. Pricing starts at $99 a month for Pro, tracking ChatGPT and 50 prompts, up through Grow and Scale as engine coverage widens, with custom Enterprise terms covering all ten engines. Semrush's Content Toolkit doesn't track AI answers at all, so this loop is not something it can run without a second purchase.
Optimizing for AI citations
Surfer's AI Search Guidelines score a draft's introduction and structure against what gets cited, and its Facts feature flags facts your competitors mention that yours doesn't, on top of the usual keyword and structure guidance. The Content Toolkit's AI SEO checks look for things like clear authorship and a Q&A shape in the draft, run from the same Content Optimizer that handles ordinary SEO scoring. Both vendors describe these as guidance toward citation, not a guarantee of it, and neither publishes an independent study proving the lift.
What DeepSmith does: AEO formatting is built into how every article is written from the start, citation-ready structure, answers placed near the top, clear headings, rather than a score you optimize a draft against afterward. Opportunity Agents also target the specific prompts your tracking shows you're missing, so the next article written is aimed at a documented gap, not a general best practice.
Tracking whether it worked
This is where the two split hardest. Surfer's AI Tracker checks ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Mode, AI Overviews and Gemini, scraping the actual consumer answer interfaces rather than calling an official API, and reports mention gaps, sentiment and fan-out queries. Coverage depends heavily on plan: Discovery gets none of it, Standard gets ChatGPT only on a weekly refresh, and the full five engines with daily refresh need Pro or above. The Content Toolkit has no equivalent inside the product at all. Its listed components are the dashboard, article generator, optimizer, repurposing, topic finder and brief generator, none of which check AI answers; Semrush sells that monitoring separately as its AI Visibility Toolkit.
What DeepSmith does: every plan from Pro up tracks brand mentions, citations and share of voice on at least ChatGPT, with the Pages view showing which of your own pages are winning citations and for which tracked prompts, so the same account that writes the content also tells you whether it's being cited.
Pricing and value
DeepSmith's Pro plan is $99 a month for 20 articles, 50 tracked prompts and ChatGPT coverage, moving up through Grow at $199 and Scale at $399 as article volume, prompt tracking and engine coverage grow. Surfer's cheapest plan, Discovery at $49 a month, includes zero AI tracking, so a buyer who actually wants citation checking is really pricing Standard at $99 or Pro at $182, both billed yearly. The Content Toolkit is the simplest to price: one plan, Base, at $60 a month billed annually, with extra SEO-boosted articles and extra seats sold as add-ons, but no AI-tracking tier to climb toward because there isn't one in this product.
What DeepSmith does: one price covers writing and tracking together, so there's no second plan to buy or second vendor to reconcile data with once you decide citation tracking matters.
Which should you choose
- DeepSmith suits a content or marketing lead who wants the tracking data and the writing pipeline in one account, so the next article is aimed at a documented citation gap instead of a general keyword.
- Surfer SEO suits a team that already wants a Content Editor for SEO drafting and is willing to pay up its plan ladder for full AI-answer tracking in the same login.
- Semrush Content Toolkit suits a solo marketer or small team who wants one simply priced, guided workflow for AI-assisted content and is fine tracking citation results separately, or skipping that measurement for now.
Picking between Surfer SEO or Semrush Content Toolkit for AI search comes down to whether you want the tracking part bundled in or bought elsewhere. DeepSmith gives you both halves of the job, tracking where you're cited and writing what closes the gap, from a 7-day free trial with no long-term contract.
Try DeepSmith
See which of your pages AI is already citing, and which topics still need one, with a 7-day free trial: https://app.deepsmith.ai/auth/sign-up
