TEARDOWN 38 · REVIEWED 2026-08-16
Frase
Frase is a content tool that generates SEO briefs and drafts from a keyword, and separately tracks whether your content gets cited when people ask AI tools like ChatGPT or Perplexity questions.
The content-brief half is a SERP API plus any hosted AI model with no proprietary data behind it; the AI-visibility half means querying several AI platforms yourself instead of one connection.
Why people still pay
The DIY version needs someone to keep an eye on it — a SERP API changing its response format, an AI model getting swapped out, a script silently failing at 2am. Frase also bundles a real editor, team accounts, and the multi-platform AI-visibility tracking in one place, so a content team isn't stitching together and maintaining several separate subscriptions and scripts to get the same coverage.
BUILD YOUR OWN · WEEKEND SCOPE (CONTENT BRIEFS ONLY)
The content-brief half is realistic to build in a weekend with an AI coding tool: fetch the top-ranking pages for a keyword, strip them down to readable text, hand that to a hosted AI model with instructions to pull out the shared subtopics and structure across those pages, and show the result in a simple editor. That's several pieces wired together and worth planning for, not an afternoon's work. The AI-visibility half is more integration work than infrastructure — maintaining connections to several AI platforms as they change — so it's a separate, ongoing project rather than something the same build covers.
StackA SERP API (SerpApi, DataForSEO, or equivalent) · a readability-extraction library (e.g. Mozilla's Readability.js) to strip boilerplate from fetched pages · any hosted AI model for the brief-generation step · your own hosting. No database required for the core loop.
Build a Python script that takes a keyword and the URLs of the top 10 Google results (fetched via a SERP API such as SerpApi or DataForSEO) as input. Download each page, strip it to readable text with a readability-extraction library, and send the keyword plus all 10 texts to a hosted AI model with instructions to output: the shared H2/H3 subtopics across at least 3 of the pages, a target word count, and key terms with rough frequency. Print the result as Markdown.
Similar tools
Free alternative: ChatGPT or Claude's free tier — covers writing a brief or outline for free if you paste in competitor headings yourself; nothing free replicates Frase's automated SERP scraping and live content-score-against-rankings
QUESTIONS
Does Frase have a free trial?
Yes — 7 days, no credit card required, at Professional-tier feature level.
What is Frase's AI Visibility feature?
It checks whether your content gets cited when people ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, or similar tools questions — the same rented-API pattern as the content-brief tool, just pointed at a different target.