Surfer SEO – An Honest Review of AI Tools for Content Writing ✍️🤖

Let’s be real—writing good content is hard, and writing content that ranks on Google is even harder.

This morning, I thought: Why not let AI do the heavy lifting for once? We’re in 2025—almost three years after ChatGPT came out—and by now, I expected some tools out there to be smarter than me at content writing.

So, I decided to run a little experiment.

My goal? Improve two of my websites using a modern AI-powered content tool:

• Learn Dapper: A tutorial site that already ranks #1 for most Dapper ORM keywords
• Entity Framework Extensions: A product site offering a paid library (Entity Framework Extensions) that extends Entity Framework

Let’s see if these tools can actually help or if they’re just more hype.

What I Expect from an Online Tool ✅

I’m not asking for too much. Just the basics:

• Help improve my titles and meta descriptions
• Fix spelling and grammar mistakes
• Improve the overall content structure
• Suggest internal links where they make sense
• Recommend high-quality external links when relevant

Surfer SEO 📊

After a few minutes of research, I found that Surfer SEO is one of the most popular tools for optimizing content using AI and SEO data.

You can try it for free for 7 days, and here’s their pricing page.

Surfer SEO is built to help writers, marketers, and business owners improve their content by analyzing what’s already ranking on Google. It gives you real-time suggestions based on top-performing pages for your selected keyword.

With this tool, you can:

• Get a live content score as you write
• Receive keyword suggestions based on real search data
• Optimize your headings, paragraphs, and word count
• Get recommendations for internal and external links
• Compare your content to your competitors
• And more...

Getting Started with Surfer SEO ▶️

To get started, I took the time to watch a few YouTube videos to better understand what Surfer SEO is all about:

• SurferSEO Review: Best SEO Tool for Content Optimization, Rankings, and Traffic Growth
• 🚀 Surfer SEO Review & Demo | Best SEO Optimization Tool for Content Audits & Ranking
• Semrush Vs Surfer SEO (Best SEO Software Is...?)
• Frase vs Surfer SEO Comparison: Which One is Right for You?

After that, I subscribed to Surfer SEO directly through their website.

My First Impression 👀

My first impression was how easy the whole process was:

1. They asked me to connect my Google Search Console to their platform. I hesitated at first—mostly for privacy reasons—but eventually accepted since it’s a common step in most SEO tools.
2. Right after connecting, they displayed all my verified websites.
3. I selected "Learn Dapper" and "Entity Framework Extensions", then picked a few pages I wanted to analyze.
4. And voilà! It took around five minutes to audit and analyze all my pages.

The setup was fast and easy—just a few clicks and I was already inside the dashboard.

The interface is very clean, and navigating the platform is surprisingly intuitive. Even after watching all those YouTube videos, I didn’t expect to feel this comfortable using the tool after just a few minutes.

There’s a minimal learning curve, which is rare these days with so many overloaded platforms. It gave me hope that maybe this would finally be the SEO tool that fits my me.

Auto Optimize Feature ⚙️

It only took a few minutes before I started playing with their Auto Optimize feature.

And honestly? The process was incredibly easy:

1. Click Auto Optimize
2. Go grab a coffee ☕
3. Come back 5 minutes later… and boom — your article magically jumps from a score of 40/100 to 80/100!

So easy? Yes… but here comes a big, gigantic BUT.

For both of my websites, the result just felt wrong. The tool was adding words just to add words, inserting paragraphs just to fill space, and overall, it made everything harder to read.

One thing I did like, though, was how easy it was to review all the changes. You could navigate through them and see exactly what was added or removed.

Yes, the SEO score improved — from 40+ to over 80 out of 100.

But at what cost?

Problems I Noticed 🚫

• On my Learn Dapper website, it kept injecting an “Introduction to Dapper” section in almost every article. That’s pointless — I already have a full page for that. It even added entire sections that didn’t belong there.
• On my Entity Framework Extensions website, it got worse. It added irrelevant content… and even mentioned competitors. HELL NO.

Did I get a few small ideas from what it generated? Sure. A sentence here, a phrase there. But in the end?

I had to cancel everything.

Would the optimized version rank higher in Google thanks to keyword stuffing and longer word count? Maybe yes. Maybe no. But one thing was sure:

The message to my readers wasn’t as strong anymore.

After just a few tries, I realized:

I couldn’t use this feature at all.

Inserting Internal Links 🔗

Let’s try the next big feature: inserting internal links.

Once again, the process was super simple — just click a button and wait! I could even insert internal links from another one of my websites, which is awesome.

Awesome, right? I came back from my second coffee break ☕ and found that 6 new links had been automatically added to the article for Dapper Plus.

It took me a moment to figure out how to view only the newly added links — but once you know, you know.

Then I looked at those famous links… And none of them made any sense:

• A link to my "All Providers" page was added in a sentence where I was talking about parameters — which has nothing to do with it
• A link to a third-party library that had absolutely nothing to do with the article
• And so on...

I tried the same thing on the BulkInsert page for our Entity Framework Extensions website — same results. ALL link was weird, unrelated, and just didn’t fit the context.

Thanks, but no thanks. I guess that’s another feature I just can’t use.

It felt more random than helpful.

Plagiarism Checker 🧠

I told myself, “Let’s try at least one easy feature”—a plagiarism tool.

It worked like a charm…

But not in a good way.

It reported every paragraph as duplicate content—because it matched paragraphs from my own website (yes, the exact page I was analyzing).

That’s not helpful at all.

They should automatically ignore content from the same domain—or at least let me exclude certain domains from the check. Without that, the feature is pretty much useless.

I want the tool to flag real duplicate content found elsewhere on the internet—not alert me that every single paragraph exists… on the page I’m currently editing.

Having to check each one manually just to confirm it’s from my own site?

No thanks.

Writing a New Article 📝

Surfer SEO is also made for writing new articles — so let’s try it!

When I started writing this exact article, I did it through Surfer SEO… but quickly realized that either I don’t know how to use it properly, or there’s literally no point in using it for how I write.

After about an hour of writing, I hadn’t used any of their tools. Why?

• I couldn’t fix spelling mistakes for just one paragraph
• I couldn’t improve a single paragraph without affecting the rest
• I couldn’t brainstorm or bounce ideas around the way I do with ChatGPT

I also couldn’t use their Auto Optimize feature while writing — because it would flood my draft with paragraphs I didn’t want to include at all.

Sure, I could mix it with ChatGPT… But at that point, what’s even left for Surfer SEO to do?

Having a live SEO score and seeing keyword suggestions is nice… But it also adds a bit of noise while you're trying to focus on writing.

In short, the process didn’t feel flexible or natural.

Surfer SEO vs ChatGPT Project 🆚🤝

After spending an hour trying to create an article with Surfer SEO, I just gave up— I was losing my time!

Maybe I’m just too much of a fan of all my ChatGPT Projects.

I’ve created so many projects with my own instructions:

• That keep my tone
• That score my text and give me clear pros and cons
• That tell me what’s missing and how a reader might perceive it

Through those projects, I can work on a title, a single paragraph, or the entire article—whatever I need, step by step.

It simply does what I want it to do. Yes, I’m dependent on the ChatGPT platform—but it works exactly the way I ask it to work.

With ChatGPT, I feel like I’m working with a real assistant. I build my articles faster, and they come out better.

Conclusion 🎯

I gave up trying Surfer SEO by the second day and asked for a refund.

• ❌ It just didn’t feel natural.
• ❌ It didn’t feel like my way of writing.
• ❌ It’s missing context.
• ❌ It’s missing flexibility.
• ❌ It’s missing the kind of instructions I rely on to keep my voice and writing style consistent.

They clearly have tons of customers—so I’m sure it’s a great tool for many content creators.

But for me?

It’s just not the right fit.

That said, I still enjoyed discovering this tool.

And who knows—maybe one day, I’ll build my own version based on everything I wish it had.