Having a consistent, meaningful content strategy is more important than ever as we begin seeing generative engine optimization (GEO, or targeting LLMs) compete in importance with traditional search engine optimization (SEO). With people treating ChatGPT and Claude as their new Google, it's no longer enough to build backlinks and target keywords on your landing pages. Websites now need to answer a variety of questions and explore nuanced topics in detail to be picked up by LLMs.

Naturally, navigating this new AI world can be assisted with AI: automated copywriters that target keywords or topics optimized for both SEO and GEO. I tried five different copywriting tools to automate a blog and wanted to briefly describe my experience with each of them.

An interesting detail about the niche I'm working with is that it deals with a lot of sensitive, adult-leaning topics. LLMs notoriously have a lot of guardrails in place to avoid discussing sensitive topics in ways that might encourage fringe behavior, so I was worried that all of the LLMs used in these services would break when trying to handle the topics, but fortunately that wasn't the case.

Writesonic

This was the tool I had the most hope in as it seems like the most robust, established platform. Its primary features are:

• Automated article and page generation

• Content strategy planner

• GEO analysis

• SEO analysis

As I'm only interested in automated copywriting, I didn't dig too much into the analytical tools.

Unfortunately, this tool left me fairly disappointed with both the workflow and the quality of the output. There are a few ways to generate content, with the main methods being:

1. Create a one-off article

2. Create a content strategy and then create articles from the strategy

In either case, you have to go through the article generation workflow, which is a bit cumbersome. The recommended workflow is a 10-step process in which you make a lot of decisions about the article. Those decisions include:

1. Topic

2. Article type (news, blog, comparisons, etc.)

3. Competitor articles

4. Keywords

5. Title

6. Secondary keywords

7. Configurations (heading and word count, writing style, etc.)

8. Headings

9. Enhancements ("humanized" article, comparison table, expert quotes, etc.)

The problem is: despite this long and tedious process, I found the quality quite low compared to simpler platforms. The outputted content is not very well-structured, and the product was only mentioned briefly in two sentences in the article. Even worse, those two sentences were nearly identical, even in the "humanized" version of the article. The system outputs a variety of article formats like: original generation, humanized variation, and brand style variation.

I was also not a fan of the images generated. There was only one image generated, and it has that sort of "overly perfect and exaggerated" AI style. I've included the image below for reference.

Another problem with the generation process was the research process of finding competing content. There is one major competitor in my space and maybe one or two smaller competitors, but the research phase found a defunct Patreon page and one unrelated website.

There is a beta feature that creates articles with a shortened generation process, but its flagship generation process left me unimpressed, so I didn't try the beta version either.

The content strategy planner tool is nice and is closer to what I'm looking for in an automated copywriter. I don't like tools where I need to decide keywords, topics, content ideas, etc. on my own. The strategy system finds keywords and topics from your website and generates a list of article ideas with keyword data from Ahrefs and Google. A useful feature is that it doesn't just suggest blog articles but also landing pages or web pages based on the content. For example, you've probably researched a product from Company A before, and Company A's website will have a page comparing itself to Company B, C, and D. Writesonic will recommend these as dedicated web pages.

However, once the strategy generates keywords and content ideas for you, you're sent back to the same tedious article generation process, just with slightly more information and a better idea of what the article should be about.

Ultimately I didn't find this loop very impressive and it consumed quite a bit of time just to generate a single article.

Kitful

I think I saw the creator of this platform advertising on Reddit and decided to give it a try. It effectively only does automated copywriting (which is fine for me) and has auto-blogging so articles can be created and published on a schedule with little or no oversight. It also seems to offer (free?) tools like as SERP analysis, SEO checker, and text humanizer. I assume these are free because you leave the main dashboard to access them, and they aren't mentioned in the paid plans.

The workflow here is a bit better than Writesonic for me because you can configure automated campaigns. You can either choose a base topic and have Kitful recommend keywords from there, or it can scan your website along with a "niche" that you enter, and it will suggest content across various verticals. I found this to be overall a decent process, and I even used its keyword and article title recommendations in apps that I liked a little better (spoiler).

The letdown here was that I wasn't very fond of the content in that it seemed like it would require some manual cleanup on my part. In some articles, my product was never mentioned at all. In others, the comparison tables it generated sometimes made competitors' pricing or features look better than mine even though my product is more feature-rich at a lower price point (because the pricing models are slightly different). There were also a lot of dead links to non-existent web sites or web pages.

I do think the articles were well-structured and digestible. The articles as a whole aren't overly long, and each paragraph contains just the information it needs to convey its purpose. There is also about one image per article, and the images with humans look like AI. An example is below.

It's not a bad platform, but again it's something that looks like it would take some of my time to manage correctly and clean up articles as needed.

Massblogger

Unfortunately, this was the biggest letdown. Here are a few of its features:

• Automated research and writing workflows

• SEO analysis

• Automated SEO page builder

I may have hit some guardrails here. My product uses the word "collar" in its name (see above regarding the sensitive niche), so the SEO researcher generated highly irrelevant keywords: "personalized dog collars with names", "custom dog collars etsy", "top 10 best selling pet products," etc. Either this is a guardrail issue or its researcher is just awful at understanding context.

I did not use the platform beyond this.

Contentpen

This was the first platform I purchased a subscription to in order to explore it more fully as a potential long-term solution. Its main features are:

• Automated article writing

• Automated keyword research

• Search analytics

The workflow here was much closer to what I was looking for in an automated copywriting platform. You enter your website URL, it builds a knowledgebase about your product, and it suggests keywords to target based on volume and ranking difficulty. There doesn't seem to be any focus on GEO. There is a lot of flexibility in the knowledgebase to ensure the AI understands your product, although uploading custom knowledge documents (and using search analytics) is only on the higher-tier plan (which I am not currently paying for).

After getting a list of recommended keywords, all you need to do is click the button to generate articles for the ones you're interested in. Then the article is generated and you can manually publish it, add it to your publishing schedule, etc. Scheduled articles are automatically published to your website.

I found the content of the articles very decent although quite long. There are also real, non-hallucinated quotes from authority figures in my niche, and there are links to useful resources. Each article has a lot of images (maybe more than I would like), though the image quality is decent. An example is below; it still looks like AI but better than the previous examples.

Downsides of the platform are that it's a bit buggy. Sometimes when I click the button to generate an article from a keyword, I get a generic error (HTTP 500) until I try a few times. After that, article generation usually fails a few times. After that, schedule articles don't always seem to be automatically published. Today was the first day that the scheduled article automatically published; the previous scheduled article did not auto-publish and I had to do it myself.

There is still manual work I have to do in picking keywords, generating the article, and choosing when to schedule it, but I think the content quality and overall ease of the platform makes it worth it.

BlogSEO

This is another platform I saw promoted on Reddit. It is the most hands-free experience, and it appears to focus on both SEO and GEO. Features include:

• Automated article writing

• Automated article planning

• Backlink network

I found the workflow here to be best as far as a minimal-overhead strategy. After entering your website, it suggests keywords and fills an entire calendar with article headlines. Once it comes time to generate the articles, the articles for that day are generated based on the headline (and presumably associated keywords, product information, etc.).

There is a small knowledgebase for your product's content, though I'd like to see this expanded to be as robust as Contentpen's with various documents and scoped content. After changing the knowledgebase, you have the option to regenerate all planned headlines in order to account for the potentially-changed product scope.

The articles generated here are very good quality with usually one or two images. I found the images to be better than any other platform. An example is below.

You could maybe convince me that this is a stock photo rather than an AI image. There are also (in my case) text-based images in the article (imagine a whiteboard or a flow chart), and the text is not garbled unlike virtually every other text-containing image in my testing.

While the content doesn't seem to have "expert quotes" like Contentpen (in the articles that I've generated so far), there are properly-cited links to real psychology journals, links to highly-authoritative organizations, etc.

One thing I don't like about the content is that my product is usually not mentioned until the end of the article. To me, this makes it unclear how my product ties into the topic at hand unless you read to the very end of the article. Still, the content in the article will be useful to the reader, and they are already on my website if they are reading it. I will need to do some testing here though to see how often articles from one platform convert when compared to articles from another platform.

Additionally, it seems like the content publishing time can't be changed and is not reliable anyway. My calendar says my articles will be generated at 9:00 am. What time zone is that? Who knows. However, the articles that were actually generated were done so at 2:55 pm (in my time zone) and finally published at 4:43 pm (in my time zone). Even if I convert my time zone to common time zones like UTC or EST/EDT, it doesn't come close to the 9:00 am in any relevant time zone. A small gripe, but I would like to know when my content is going to be created and/or published.

This is the second platform where I've decided to spend money on it, although it is one of the most expensive options here.

Semantic Pen

I can't recommend this platform at all because it lies in its marketing. The home page states you get three free articles with registration (like most other platforms as part of their trial), but that is not the case. When trying to generate even one article, there is a silent error (no UI feedback whatsoever):

[handleArticleSubmit2] No personalization name provided in values
1b70afdeef96f02d.js:72 [checkCredits] Called with creditsNeeded: 5, sectionNumber: 2, user: <redacted>
1b70afdeef96f02d.js:72 [checkCredits] commonArticleCreationData: {credits: 0, ltd_credits: 0, monthly_ltd_credits: 0, articleContent: '', isFormScrolled: false}
1b70afdeef96f02d.js:72 [checkCredits] Using provided credits - credits: 0 ltd_credits: 0 monthly_ltd_credits: 0 total: 0
1b70afdeef96f02d.js:72 [checkCredits] Not enough credits from commonData: 0 needed: 5 for user: <redacted>

Maybe there is some combination of settings that will give me these magical free credits, but I am not going to go out of my way to find it. I consider this platform to be falsely advertising.