4 AI Tools for Content Briefs (Tested by an SEO Writer)

A high-quality AI content brief generator can help you find related topics and keywords quickly, streamline the content creation process, and make it easier to get marketing content onto your site regularly.

But if you choose a low-quality tool, or try to use a general purpose chat platform that doesn't understand context about keywords and SEO, you may wind up hurting your content marketing performance in the long run. I've personally tried and tested each of the high-quality content brief generation tools listed in this guide. While each one is reliable, I prefer some more than others—and explain why below.

1. Semrush: Best for Most Marketers

Semrush is a trusted, reliable SEO platform that offers two tools for creating content briefs: the SEO Content Template tool and the SEO Brief Generator.

The SEO Content Template is a fast and helpful way to generate a brief and analyze your search engine results page (SERP) competitors for a given topic. Each template includes information about:

• The top 10 sites currently ranking in the SERP
• Semantic keywords to improve the SEO quality of your text
• A suggested readability score and article length
• Potential backlinks to pursue
• How your competitors are using the target keyword in their content

You can view these results in your browser, export the template to a Microsoft Word file, or send it to the SEO Writing Assistant or the AI Article Generator.

The SEO Brief Generator, which is part of the Content Toolkit, lets you customize every aspect of the brief. It's a more time intensive process than using the SEO Content Template, but you retain more control over the result.

To use the SEO Brief Generator, you'll need to:

• Conduct keyword research and enter your primary term into the generator
• Review a list of possible competitors and select the ones you'd like to focus on
• Choose a word count and suggested title
• Confirm the secondary keywords that you want to include in the text
• Review the suggested article structure and make any changes to headings and sections
• Select a meta title and description

The generator gives you suggestions for keywords, content, and structure along the way—you don't have to create anything from scratch, but you can completely change the brief if you want to.

It's easy to send your brief to Semrush's content optimizer tool, too, which will give you real-time SEO feedback as you write.

Semrush One plans start at $165.17 per month (when billed annually); the Content Toolkit is an additional $60 per month. You can also create a free Semrush account and only subscribe to the Content Toolkit, which makes it a very affordable option for many marketers.

2. MarketMuse: Best for Low-Volume Content Production

The MarketMuse platform is useful for both creating content briefs and getting suggestions on ways to refresh older content that already exists on your site.

When you first start using MarketMuse, you can choose if you'd like to:

• Analyze the competitive and SERP landscape
• Research topics and plan content
• Generate a brief

One thing I like about MarketMuse is that you can specify what kind of content your brief is for. The app doesn't automatically assume you're writing a long blog post. You can choose to create a brief for:

• Informational articles
• Comparison pieces
• Frequently asked questions
• How-to guides
• Listicles
• News updates
• Product reviews
• Localized content

MarketMuse pricing is available upon request; plans include the ability to create between five and 20 content briefs per month. As a result, MarketMuse is only suitable for teams with fairly low content creation needs.

3. SE Ranking: Best Semrush Content Toolkit Alternative

SE Ranking's content marketing tool has several similarities to the Semrush Content Toolkit.

Both tools are connected to a larger SEO research platform, which makes it easy to identify keywords and plan other elements of your content strategy while generating briefs. And, like Semrush, SE Ranking includes both a brief creator and a content scoring tool.

When you use the SE Ranking platform, you can adjust the brief both while you create it and after you've sent the results to the included text editor. The briefs include information about:

• Competing SERP pages
• Content length, images, heading frequency, and other structural elements
• Semantic keywords
• External links (you can manually add internal links as well)
• Questions to include
• Meta titles and descriptions

If you don't want to use SE Ranking's text editor, you can export the brief to a Word document or share it with someone else via a link.

SE Ranking plans start at $103.20 per month when billed annually and include 25 to 50 article briefs per month depending on plan.

4. Clearscope: Best for Corporate Teams

Clearscope is a content optimization platform that provides both briefing and analysis tools.

 It's similar to the Semrush Content Toolkit in that Clearscope helps you find semantic keywords and scores your text as you write. But unlike Semrush, Clearscope doesn't give you access to a host of other tools at the same time.

You can use Clearscope to:

• Conduct top-level keyword research
• Identify competitors and semantic keywords for a term
• Monitor your existing content and get notifications when it's time for a refresh
• Generate outlines and article text

Clearscope generates reports that work in one of two ways:

1. You can have the tool's built-in AI generate an entire draft for you based on parameters that you set.
2. You can open up a blank text editor with Clearscope's keyword, competitor, and heading suggestions in a side panel.

Each Clearscope report is the content brief. There's no good way to export it to a document, but luckily, you can share reports with anyone via a link. The recipient doesn't need their own Clearscope account, and they'll be able to put text into the editor and get a score.

Clearscope is one of the more expensive content brief tools on the market, though, with plans starting at $129 per month.

What Makes an AI Content Brief Tool a Good Choice?

I've been playing around with different AI content brief generation tools since before ChatGPT launched publicly in 2022, and in this time I've noticed that there are distinct differences in the outputs between high and low-quality generators.

To find a high-quality AI content brief generation tool, you'll want to look for the following:

• A connection to a reliable SEO platform. This can be a generator that's made by an SEO company (like the ones made by Semrush and SE Ranking) or a platform that allows you to connect an SEO tool API.
• Editing features. Content marketing still requires a human touch, so it's important that your AI content brief generation tool allows you to manually pick and choose what appears in the brief. Otherwise, a brief generated in one shot may include poor keywords, inaccuracies, and even plagiarized content.
• Clear scoring systems. It should be easy to understand how and why the tool is giving importance to different topics, terms, and structures.

The resulting content briefs should include information about:

• The target keyword and search intent
• The target audience
• Article format and length
• Important subheadings
• Additional relevant keywords
• Questions and AI prompts to target
• External and internal links to include

You'll probably need to add some of this information to your brief manually, regardless of which AI-driven tool you choose to use.