Surfer SEO

What it is

Surfer answers a narrower question than a full SEO suite: given this keyword, what should this specific page contain. It analyses what currently ranks and scores your draft against it as you write, on structure, length and topic coverage, so optimization happens during writing rather than as a separate pass afterwards.

Newer tiers add AI visibility tracking, monitoring how often your brand appears in answers from assistants such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google and Gemini, weekly on Standard and daily on Pro and above.

Who it's for (and who it isn't)

It fits people who publish regularly and want their writing to compete on pages that already have competition: content marketers, agencies producing articles for clients, businesses with a real blog. The document credits tell you the intended volume, from 120 a year on Discovery to unlimited at the top.

It is a weaker fit for a business publishing once a month, where the subscription costs more than the traffic is worth. And it is not a substitute for research: Surfer optimizes a page for a keyword you already chose, which is a different job from deciding what to write about. That is Semrush territory.

Pricing

Surfer is paid with no free plan. Discovery is EUR 49 per month billed yearly, with 120 documents and 10 tracked pages. Standard is EUR 99 per month with 360 documents and 25 AI prompts tracked weekly on ChatGPT. Pro is EUR 182 per month with 360 documents, 50 prompts refreshed daily across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google and Gemini, and 5 brand workspaces. Peace of Mind is EUR 299 per month with unlimited documents, 100 daily prompts, all models and API access. AI Search Analytics is sold standalone at EUR 158 per month, and Enterprise starts at EUR 999. Prices as shown here were quoted in euros.

Document credits are the unit to plan around. Divide your annual publishing target by the credits in each tier before comparing anything else.

Set it up

Official guide: Content Editor Overview

1. Create a Surfer account and choose the Discovery plan (EUR 49/mo billed yearly), which includes 120 documents and 10 tracked pages. Surfer has no free plan. Each Content Editor you create counts as one document, and so does an import from a URL. Before you go on, pick one keyword, meaning the phrase you want your page to show up for in Google. Your account is now on the Discovery plan.
2. Click "Content Editor" in the left menu, then "+ New Content". Type your main keyword. Surfer shows suggested alternatives, so pick the one that matches what your customers would type. Choose a location and language, then continue to the deep analysis. Surfer now studies the pages that already rank for your keyword.
3. Select a template that fits your document and click "Next". Check the context page, which is optional, and click "Next" again. You now see the choice between "Write it yourself" and "Generate content".
4. Choose "Write it yourself". The editor opens at once, empty, and the guidelines on the right fill in while the analysis finishes.
5. Open the "Research & Create Outline" step in the guidelines panel on the right. It lists the outlines of the top-ranking pages. Read them as a sign of what readers expect to find. Then type your own headings in the editor, without copying theirs. You now see your own outline in the document.
6. Write your draft in the editor and cover the terms and topics that the guidelines list. Do not chase a score of 100, because over-optimizing can hurt your final text. Your draft is now ready to compete once its Content Score, a value from 0 to 100, is over 66.
7. To improve an old article, go back to the main Content Editor page and use the "Import from URL" option at the top. Enter the page address. Surfer scans the page, imports its text, and shows you guidelines and a Content Score for it.

When this works, you have written one new page with Surfer's guidelines beside you, and you have a score for one older page that shows where to improve it.

Strengths and limitations

The strength is immediacy. A score that updates while you write turns a vague instruction to "write for SEO" into something concrete, and for teams briefing freelance writers it is a useful shared standard.

The limitations are the score itself and the price shape. Optimizing to a number can produce keyword-stuffed, mechanical prose that ranks briefly and reads badly, which is the opposite of what search engines increasingly reward. There is no free plan, credits cap your output, and the AI visibility features that dominate the higher tiers are a young and moving field. Treat the score as advice from a tool that has read the competition, not as a target to maximize.