
By Chris Haines
Senior SEO Specialist at Ahrefs
I’ve tested many different AI tools. And in my opinion, there are some that can help increase the efficiency of your copywriting.
But before we get to the list, I want to confirm that you shouldn’t rely on these tools 100%.
Although their output may often seem impressive, concerns have been raised about AI tools because AI:
And assuming that hasn’t put you off… let’s scroll down and look at the tools you can use for AI copywriting.
Most conversations about AI start with ChatGPT. It’s popular for a reason, i.e., good at providing answers to questions.
Although it’s not a dedicated AI copywriting tool, ChatGPT introduced many people outside of SEO to AI copywriting and was more accessible than Open AI’s GPT Playground or the GPT-4 API.
With caution, you can use ChatGPT for the following copywriting tasks:
I asked ChatGPT to come up with some ideas for SEO agency names. I was fairly happy with the output. It even told me to check that the domain names were available afterward, which was a nice touch.
I then asked it to summarize the main principles of SEO, and it similarly delivered decent output.
Then I followed up with another question about the pros and cons of SEO—no major issues so far.
Lastly, I gave it the somewhat controversial prompt: “Can you give me a list of the best SEO experts in the world in a table?”
The eagle-eyed among you will notice something’s not quite right here.
Here’s what I realized:
The answer:
This is a good example of how easy it is to be led astray by AI when it comes to research.
If you had republished this table, you’d be publishing false information.
Google Bard received mixed reviews online. But in my opinion, it’s reasonably competitive with ChatGPT.
Like ChatGPT, Google is transparent about Bard being an experiment and that it gets things wrong. Google even mentions that the tool can be inaccurate or inappropriate on the Bard homepage.
One of the things I like about Bard is that its output is fast, especially when compared to ChatGPT’s free version.
When I asked Bard the same questions (as seen in the ChatGPT section), the response was different. And to be honest, this was not what I expected it to say.
It answered the question, but the answer seemed to be taken from Google’s own development blog.
What it gave was correct, but it lacked the SEO jargon of the ChatGPT response.
And for the “table” question, it generated a similar, limited, and somewhat cautious answer.
With the final question, let’s see who it thought the “best SEO experts in the world” were.
Looking at the output, we can analyze a few things.
Here’s what I noticed:
When asked a more direct follow-up question, Bard hallucinated on gender.
These examples show that although it provided some correct answers, it could still hallucinate. Hence, you should be cautious using these tools for your copywriting.
If you use Bard for research, you should always manually fact-check the results.
I also asked Bard to summarize one of our articles, and it provided a decent response.
One of the benefits of Bard compared to the free version of ChatGPT is you can plug in URLs to get summaries.
This is an excellent time-saver, allowing you to summarize articles to understand the key points quickly.
Notion may not be the first place that you think of when it comes to AI copywriting, but it’s got an impressive AI integration that’s fast and user-friendly.
If you’ve used Notion before, you’ll find it easy to use. You can see from the above image the type of commands that are possible.
Notion says the key features are the ability to “work faster, write better and think bigger.”
I noticed that to access the AI menu, you only need to press “/” on the keyboard, meaning there are minimum mouse clicks required to generate content.
In my opinion, Notion is one of the most accessible AI copywriting tools to improve efficiency.
You can use Notion AI to do the following:
When I asked Notion AI to write about SEO basics, it did a decent job and was fast to generate content.
This could be useful for managers who want to create employee handbooks that explain certain concepts like SEO quickly within Notion.
One of the first paid AI copywriting tools I used was Conversion.ai, which was renamed to Jarvis, then renamed again to Jasper.
With the release of ChatGPT and Google Bard, some SEOs have started questioning Jasper’s place in the market.
But Jasper’s still popular and has a $1.5 billion valuation at the time of writing.
So why should you use Jasper over any of the other tools we’ve mentioned above?
Here are my thoughts:
When I asked Jasper to write about SEO basics, it produced this:
This was set to a medium output length, and it produced 58 words.
The output also left me on a cliffhanger, encouraging me to generate more content.
Using one of the preset templates, I generated a title tag and meta description for Jasper’s site on AI copywriting. The result was good.
Copy.ai allows you to create content fast and efficiently. It has a lot of useful templates and, in my opinion, is probably one of the most cost-effective solutions for AI copywriters and small teams.
I asked Copy.ai to write about SEO basics.
It formatted the content in a numbered list, making it easy to scan. The list also seemed to be a reasonably good summary of the key topics.
Wordtune is a tool I had to research before writing this article, as it’s not as familiar to me as some of the others in this list. But it has some good features.
As the name suggests, this product is more focused on enhancing your text than just generating it.
It has an interestingly named beta feature called “Spices,” which allows you to spice up your copy.
Overall, Wordtune is most likely suited for copywriters looking to enhance and improve their existing content rather than those looking to create something from scratch.
I asked Wordtune to “write about SEO basics,” and it produced the following:
The content lacked subheadings and was quite intense. The purple font also, in my opinion, made it harder to read than some of the other tools here.
But I like the ability to tweak the content using the shorten, expand, and tone selectors to change the tone of voice within the article.
If you do most of your writing in Google Docs, then you’ll feel at home with Maker.ai.
The key thing about this product, in my opinion, is the workflow has been carefully designed with the user in mind.
First of all, it generates multiple titles for your article based on your keywords; then it comes up with an outline that you can tweak.
As seen above, it’s also not shy about revealing (on the homepage) that it’s using GPT-4.
I gave it a prompt (“write about SEO basics”), and I ended up with a 1,500-word article in a few minutes.
I like that you can make edits at every stage in the writing process using this tool.
Scalenut has a strong emphasis on the research stage of copywriting.
For example, once you have selected what you want to write about, it’ll show you all the top questions across different channels (Quora, Reddit, and Google’s People Also Ask SERP feature) that are presented in a feed.
You can then insert some of these questions into your outline and build your content brief.
Another nice feature is it curates some of the top statistics for your article topic automatically.
The quality of these results will vary depending on the topic and will always require a manual fact-check. But if you are stuck for ideas, this can be useful for creating more detailed content briefs with references without leaving the platform.
I found that creating outlines took quite a few clicks with Scalenut, but the output was detailed.
Following this, I got a series of writing points for each heading. These can be useful for making sure that most of the important points in an article you are writing are covered.
The “writing points” feature wasn’t something offered in other AI copywriting tools and could be useful for creating more detailed content briefs.
Writer is another AI copywriting tool with a familiar Google Docs–like interface and a strong emphasis on general marketing tools.
One interesting feature is that you can upload YouTube videos to generate an AI-generated recap.
This can then be used as research, or you can combine it with other YouTube recaps to help build a detailed outline for a written article.
I asked Writer to “write about SEO basics.” The total output lacked subheadings, which made it hard to scan.
That being said, Writer has a lot of useful templates, and I can see them being a great help for improving the readability of existing content. It also grades your content, which can give you more insight.
The content it generated for me was, by its own admission, “fairly difficult to read.”
Adaptify is a GPT-4 AI writer with a twist. It allows you to easily integrate third-party data sources such as Yelp, Tripadvisor, and others into your content. In my opinion, this can be particularly useful for affiliate marketing.
If you work with these third-party data sources, you'll find that this can be a time-saver for marketers working in certain industries.
One of the generated article examples on Adaptify shows how third-party data can be integrated into your content.
The exact nature of the output depends on the prompt sequence that you specify. But you can also pick from a range of templates, which makes this a powerful tool if you work with third-party data sources, such as Yelp, Tripadvisor, Amazon, or Google Maps.
What I like about Adaptify is the ability to customize your own sequence of prompts.
Byword is a clean-looking website with a good workflow powered by GPT-4.
Like some of the other tools we’ve looked at, Byword guides you through the content generation process and suggests subheadings automatically.
Not all of them were 100% relevant to the topic of “SEO basics.” But I think it is a good place to start if you need ideas on how to structure your article.
With this tool, you can switch output between text, HTML, and markup, which I found useful.
There were no obvious issues with the text content output. I think you can use this to get inspiration early in the writing process for creating your drafts.
In my opinion, the feature that will save copywriters time is the ability to publish directly to platforms like WordPress or Webflow.
Autoblogging can output an entire article if you give it an input reference. I used the “SEO basics” Ahrefs article as a reference, and Autoblogging gave the following output using “Godlike mode.”
Despite the rustic-looking UX, Autoblogging delivered a fairly decent article (based on a quick scan).
At the final stage, I decided to run the article through Copyscape, Diffchecker, and ZeroGPT.
Copyscape and Diffchecker weren’t able to detect any similarities, but ZeroGPT seemed to think that it was 24.69% AI GPT.
Copyleaks, another AI detection tool, thought that it was 67.5% AI.
Although it’s not a rigorous test, hopefully it shows that AI detection tools can give different results when it comes to detecting a 100% AI-written article.
AI copywriting sounds great at first, but it comes with its own issues. You’ll need to know the shortcomings of the tools you’re using to increase your copywriting efficiency and effectiveness.
Blindly publishing content from these tools is risky. But if used prudently, AI copywriting can help you scale your content production. You’ll still need tools like Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer and Site Explorer to research and target your content effectively, though.
Got more questions? Ping me on Twitter. 🙂

Chris is a Senior SEO Specialist at Ahrefs. He brings ten years of London SEO agency experience to the team. In his career, Chris has worked in both the technical and content teams and has personally led top clients to SEO success in the retail, telco, and travel industries. Chris is a self-taught SEO and started out by ranking his parent’s craft site in his spare time. From there, he developed his skills in smaller agencies, eventually working his way up to larger agencies such as MSQ and Publicis Groupe. Chris’s work has been featured in several publications, including SERoundtable and Search Engine Journal.
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