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Surfer alternatives

7 tools that do a similar job, and what makes each one different.

What Surfer is

Surfer is an SEO content optimisation platform. It analyses the pages already ranking for a keyword and turns what it finds into guidance you write against, covering research, briefing, drafting and on-page optimisation in one place. The core tools are the Content Editor, the SERP Analyzer, a Topical Map and NLP keyword suggestions, with a plagiarism checker alongside them. Surfer's own framing of the loop is research, audit, write, optimise and generate an SEO-optimised article in twenty minutes. Pages that already exist are catered for as well as new drafts, so a piece that has slipped can be audited and reworked rather than replaced. It was built by a team of engineers, marketers and SEO specialists. Topic handles briefing. A brief takes about ten minutes to put together, which Surfer describes as half the time editors and agencies otherwise spend, and about three hours less per report than gathering the same insights by hand. Surfer also cites a threefold increase in organic search clicks from using it. That is a vendor figure, so read it as a claim rather than a measured result. Surfer is designed to sit where the writing already happens. There is a WordPress connection for optimising directly, keyword suggestions inside Google Docs, Surfer guidelines visible while editing in Contentful, and Zapier for building custom workflows around the rest. It works with ChatGPT for SEO-tuning AI-generated drafts, and with Jasper for writing to Surfer's own best practices. Keyword Surfer, a free Chrome extension, puts keyword data into Google's results pages themselves, which is the cheapest way to see how the tool thinks before paying for anything. Plans, billed yearly, run from Discovery at $49 a month through Standard at $99 and Pro at $182 to Peace of Mind at $299. AI Search Analytics tracks 100 AI prompts for $158 a month. API access is not included by default: it is available only to active users who buy the API add-on or who are on an Enterprise plan. Surfer reports users in more than 159 countries and a community of over 150,000 customers.

Sitebulb

Technical SEO auditing that explains why each issue matters and what to do about it, rather than emitting a list of flags and leaving prioritisation to you. Crawls render JavaScript, and reports are readable enough to hand to a client. The educational framing is the differentiator; it is often run alongside a raw crawler rather than instead of one.

Paid

Semrush

Has a free tier, unlike Surfer

Freemium

Ahrefs

The backlink index that most SEO arguments end up being settled with, alongside keyword research, rank tracking, site auditing and content exploration. The crawler is among the largest outside the search engines, which is why its link data is treated as a reference point. Expensive, with no free tier of consequence, and priced as a professional tool.

Paid

Copy.ai

Has a free tier, unlike Surfer

Freemium

Writer

Enterprise writing where a style guide is enforced rather than suggested. Terminology, tone and compliance rules are applied consistently across everyone who writes, and the platform can be grounded in a company's own knowledge. Bought by large organisations for governance and consistency; overkill for a small team and precisely the point for a regulated one.

Paid

Jasper

Marketing copy at volume, kept inside one brand's voice. Brand Voice learns from existing material, campaign tools generate a full set of assets from a brief, and templates cover the usual formats. Built for marketing teams producing a lot of copy under a consistent identity, which is a narrower job than a general assistant.

Paid