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Surfer helps you write and score content, and its Surfer AI can draft full articles one at a time. Ryze plans, writes and publishes content for you, on a schedule. The difference is where the human sits in the process.

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What each does

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The workflow difference

Surfer assumes a writer. You choose a topic, Surfer analyses ranking pages, and you write against a term list and content score. Ryze runs the whole loop: it selects topics from your Search Console and catalogue data, generates the article with internal links, and publishes it — up to 3 articles a day on weekdays, under your publishing settings. If you have a content team who write, Surfer supports them. If you do not, Ryze replaces the need for one.

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On content scores

Surfer’s optimization score is useful as a guide and unreliable as a target. Writing to maximise a score produces text stuffed with terms because a competitor used them, which is not the same as writing something worth citing. Every article in the Content Plan gets an Article score out of 100 from nine checks — content structure, internal and external links, statistics, image alt text, semantic keywords, an FAQ section, meta tags and JSON-LD schema. It’s a checklist of what the article covers, not a target to stuff terms into. Topics come from real demand data and your catalogue. See Content Plan.

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What does not transfer

  • Content briefs and outlines stay in Surfer
  • Optimization history and scores do not carry over
  • Saved keyword and topic lists have no import path
Published articles are unaffected — they live on your site and remain yours.

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Before you cancel

  1. Export any briefs or outlines you plan to write
  2. Export curated keyword and topic lists
  3. Note articles in progress, so they are not lost mid-workflow

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Setting expectations after switching

The main adjustment is editorial control. In Surfer you control each article as you write it; in Ryze the agent plans and writes the articles, and you steer the inputs and review drafts. You control it through:
  • Brand (sidebar → Brand) — what you sell, who you sell to, tone. This is the main quality lever, and the most common cause of off-target output.
  • Publishing mode — set SEO → Preferences → Publishing → Publishing mode to Manual if every article should wait for your approval before it goes live. See SEO Preferences.
  • Edit — open any draft in SEO → Content Plan and change the title, meta tags, body or scheduled date before it publishes.
If topics look wrong, fix your Brand profile rather than rejecting topics individually.