Clearscope
The editor's content grader, now tracking topics across Google and AI chatbots
Clearscope is a content optimization platform that grades drafts for topical coverage against the pages currently ranking for a query, helps teams find and plan topic clusters, and tracks how visible a brand's topics and pages are across both Google and AI answer engines like ChatGPT and Gemini, with unlimited seats on every plan.
Overview
Clearscope has always been the deliberately narrow tool in a category full of sprawling suites. Its core loop is a content report: give it a target query, and it returns the terms, questions, and topical coverage the current top results share, plus a letter grade for your draft that updates live as you write in Google Docs, Microsoft Word, WordPress, or Clearscope's own editor. Editors adopted it because the grade is defensible in a review conversation and because the interface refuses to bury the point under twelve dashboards.
The 2025 and 2026 product is broader than that, organized into named modules: Discover for topic and cluster research, Write for AI-assisted drafting, Optimize for the classic grading workflow, Protect for content analytics and decay monitoring, Expand for visibility across Google and AI chatbots, plus Localize and Internal Linking. Expand is the module that matters for anyone worried about AI Overviews. It launched as Tracked Topics in September 2025 and layers on Google Search Console data, reporting share of voice for a topic across both Google and LLM answers, which pages are being cited by AI, and which of your high-ranking pages are conspicuously absent from citations.
Clearscope's deliberate argument, made at length on its own blog, is that you should track topics rather than individual prompts, because prompts are infinite and unstable while topics are stable and plannable. That is a genuine intellectual position rather than a feature checkbox, and it is also convenient: it lets a fourteen-person bootstrapped company compete on AI visibility without building the same scraping infrastructure as much larger vendors. Buyers who specifically want prompt-level evidence should note that Clearscope meters Tracked Prompts on every plan too, 50 on Essentials and 300 on Business.
Best for
Content teams and agencies that publish regularly with multiple writers and need a shared quality bar, especially those who value unlimited seats, a clean editorial workflow inside Google Docs or Word, and topic-level rather than prompt-level AI visibility reporting.
Not the right fit for
- Solo founders and very small budgets; $129 per month for 20 topic explorations and 20 drafts is a real commitment next to Frase at $39.
- Teams that want prompt-by-prompt AI answer forensics across five engines; Clearscope tracks prompts but its stated philosophy and product emphasis are topic-level, and it names ChatGPT and Gemini most prominently rather than a long engine list.
- Anyone needing backlink data, a site crawler, or a keyword volume database; Clearscope assumes those live elsewhere and does not pretend otherwise.
- Teams that need controlled before-and-after proof that an optimization worked; Clearscope reports performance but runs no split or time-based tests.
- High-volume AI content operations; drafts are metered at 20 per month on both Essentials and Business, and extra drafts are a paid add-on.
How it works
- 1
You start a content report for a target query. Clearscope pulls the ranking pages, runs its own NLP analysis across them, and produces a report listing terms with recommended usage, related questions, competitor word counts and readability levels, and a target content grade. That report becomes the brief.
- 2
Writers work wherever they already work. The Google Docs add-on, the Word add-in, and the WordPress plugin all render the live grade and term list alongside the draft, so the grade climbs in real time without anyone copying text between tools. Every plan includes unlimited users and unlimited projects, so agencies do not pay per freelancer.
- 3
Once content is live, Protect monitors performance at site and page level and flags decay, while Expand tracks the topics you care about across Google and AI chatbots. Because Expand connects to Google Search Console, it reports clicks, impressions, and positions from your own data next to LLM mentions and citations rather than only vendor-scraped numbers.
- 4
The output that changes behavior is the citation gap: pages that rank well in Google but never get cited by AI answers. Those are the pages Clearscope pushes you toward reformatting for answer engines, which in practice means clearer structure, direct answers near the top, and original data rather than restated consensus.
Feature breakdown
25 features in 5 modulesOptimize: content grading
The original workflow and still the reason most teams buy.- Live content grade
- Grades a draft for topical coverage in real time against the pages currently ranking, giving editors a single defensible number to hold writers to.
- Term and question recommendations
- Lists the terms and related questions the top results share, with usage guidance, so gaps are visible rather than inferred.
- Competitive benchmarks
- Reports the word counts, readability levels, and coverage of ranking competitors so a brief sets realistic targets instead of arbitrary ones.
- Google Docs add-on
- The grade and term list appear beside the draft inside Docs, which is where most content teams actually write.
- Microsoft Word add-in
- The same live grading for teams standardized on Word rather than Docs.
- WordPress plugin
- Optimize inside the CMS for teams that draft directly in WordPress.
- Unlimited users and projects
- Every plan, including the $129 entry tier, includes unlimited seats, which is unusual in this category and materially changes the cost for agencies with many freelancers.
Expand: visibility across Google and AI
Launched as Tracked Topics in September 2025; the company's answer to AI answer engines.- Tracked Topics
- Monitors discoverability for a topic across Google and AI platforms including ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews, rather than tracking single keywords.
- Tracked Prompts
- Metered per plan at 50 on Essentials and 300 on Business, monitoring brand mentions in chatbot responses alongside the topic-level view.
- Query fan-out awareness
- Surfaces the underlying web searches AI platforms run while constructing an answer, which is a more actionable input than the prompt itself because those queries are what you can write for.
- AI Cited Pages view
- A content view showing which of your pages AI answers actually cite, and by omission which high-ranking pages never get picked up.
- Share of voice by topic
- Benchmarks topical authority against competitors across both search and generative answers, with subtopic strength and weakness breakdowns.
- Search Console integration
- Layers Clearscope's topic analysis over your own clicks, impressions, and positions rather than relying only on scraped third-party estimates.
- Brand sentiment in AI responses
- Reports how the brand is characterized when it does appear in a chatbot answer, not just whether it appeared.
Discover and Write: planning and drafting
Deciding what to publish and getting the first draft out.- Topic and cluster discovery
- Identifies high-impact topics and clusters rather than isolated keywords, aimed at teams building topical authority as a strategy.
- Monthly topic explorations
- Metered at 20 per month on Essentials and 50 on Business, which is the practical constraint on how much research a team can run.
- AI drafting
- Generates drafts informed by the same research that powers the content report, metered at 20 drafts per month on both paid tiers.
- Internal linking
- A dedicated module recommending internal links across the tracked site.
- Localize
- Support for adapting content to regional markets, listed as its own product module.
Protect: analytics and decay
Watching what you already published stop working.- Site and page level content analytics
- Monitors performance across the whole site or individual pages with customizable views, metered by tracked Pages at 50 on Essentials and 300 on Business.
- Decay detection
- Surfaces pages losing traffic or position so refresh work is prioritized by evidence rather than by publication date.
- Additional pages as an add-on
- Extra tracked pages cost $25 per month on Essentials and $15 per month on Business, so a large site can push the effective price well above list.
Team and enterprise controls
What changes as the account gets bigger.- Dedicated account manager
- Included from the Business tier at $399 per month.
- Crawler whitelisting
- An Enterprise feature for sites that block unfamiliar crawlers at the edge.
- Single sign-on
- Enterprise tier only, alongside custom credit allocations and custom agreements.
Use cases
4 documentedContent editor managing eight freelance writers
Draft quality swings wildly and rewriting briefs by hand for each piece has become the editor's whole job.
A Clearscope report becomes the brief and the grade becomes the acceptance bar, and because seats are unlimited, adding every freelancer to the account costs nothing extra, which is the single biggest cost difference against seat-priced competitors.
SEO manager whose top pages still rank but get no AI citations
Search Console shows stable positions on the money pages while assistants confidently recommend three competitors and never mention the brand.
The AI Cited Pages view names exactly which ranking pages are invisible to answer engines, and query fan-out data shows which underlying searches the models run, turning a reformatting project into a prioritized list.
Agency lead building a topical authority pitch
Needs to show a prospect where their coverage is thin relative to competitors across an entire subject area, not just a keyword list.
Discover's cluster analysis plus topic-level share of voice produces a gap map that reads as strategy rather than as a keyword export, and the Business tier's 300 tracked pages and prompts cover a mid-sized client comfortably.
In-house team at a bootstrapped B2B company evaluating tools
Has a modest budget and wants to know whether $129 per month buys enough to replace ad hoc briefing.
The 14 day free trial covers a full editorial cycle, and if 20 topic explorations and 20 drafts a month match the publishing cadence, the entry tier works. If the team publishes more than that, the next step is $399, and there is nothing in between.
Pricing
from $129 per month (Essentials)Flat monthly tiers metered on tracked prompts, tracked pages, monthly topic explorations, and monthly drafts. Users, projects, and team members are unlimited on every plan.
| Plan | Price | Includes |
|---|---|---|
| Essentials | $129 per month |
|
| Business | $399 per month |
Note that drafts stay at 20 per month even at triple the price; the tier buys tracking scale, not generation volume. |
| Enterprise | Custom quoted |
|
Add-ons
- Additional tracked pages ($25 per month on Essentials, $15 per month on Business): Custom on Enterprise; a large site can add meaningfully to the effective monthly cost.
- Additional drafts ($50 on Essentials, $20 on Business): Custom on Enterprise. The gap between tiers here is large enough that heavy drafters should price Business carefully.
Billing notes
- Prices are published as flat monthly figures; Clearscope does not advertise a discounted annual rate on its pricing page.
- The 14 day free trial applies to all plans and is the standard way to evaluate, which is a meaningful advantage over vendors that offer no trial at all.
- Unlimited users on every tier is the pricing decision that most changes the math: a ten-person content team pays the same as a solo operator.
- The gap between Essentials at $129 and Business at $399 is wide with nothing in between, so growing teams face a three-times jump rather than a gradual ramp.
- Monthly drafts are capped at 20 on both paid tiers, so Clearscope is not priced as an AI content-volume tool and add-on drafts get expensive quickly on Essentials.
Value assessment: Clearscope charges more per account than most of this category and less per person than any of it. If you have one writer, $129 per month for 20 topic explorations is expensive. If you have ten writers and three freelancers, unlimited seats make it the cheapest serious option on the list, because competitors that charge $29 per additional seat will pass Clearscope's price before you finish onboarding the team. The metering is honest about what the product is for: research and quality control, not content volume. Anyone planning to generate at scale will hit the 20 draft ceiling immediately and should price the add-ons before signing up.
Strengths & limitations
Strengths
- Unlimited users, projects, and team members on every plan, including the $129 entry tier, which is a genuine structural advantage for agencies and multi-writer teams.
- The grading workflow lives inside Google Docs, Word, and WordPress, so writers never have to adopt a new editor.
- Expand ties AI visibility to your own Search Console data rather than to scraped estimates alone, and the AI Cited Pages view answers a question competitors mostly leave implicit.
- Query fan-out reporting is more actionable than raw prompt tracking, because the underlying searches are things you can write pages for.
- A real 14 day free trial on every plan, which several competitors in this category do not offer.
- Small, bootstrapped, and profitable with roughly fourteen employees, which shows in a focused product that resists feature sprawl.
Limitations
- The $129 entry price is high for solo operators and small startups relative to Frase or Ranktracker, and there is no free plan.
- Metering is tight: 20 topic explorations and 20 drafts a month on Essentials go quickly, and 20 drafts stay the ceiling even on the $399 Business tier.
- The topic-first philosophy on AI visibility is defensible but it also means less prompt-level, engine-by-engine forensic detail than a dedicated tracker or Surfer's AI Tracker provides.
- Clearscope names ChatGPT and Gemini most prominently in its AI coverage; buyers who need broad, explicitly documented multi-engine coverage should confirm current engine support directly.
- No backlink index, site crawler, or keyword database, so Clearscope is always one line item in a stack rather than the whole stack.
- A three-times price jump from Essentials to Business with no middle tier makes growth expensive at exactly the point where a team starts publishing seriously.
Head-to-head comparisons
3 alternativesClearscope vs Surfer SEO
from 49 EUR per month (Discovery, billed yearly)Surfer is the bigger platform with deeper multi-engine AI tracking, drafting at volume, and topical mapping, but it charges per workspace, prices in euros, and offers no trial. Clearscope is narrower, cleaner, seat-unlimited, and trialable for 14 days. Pick Surfer when AI visibility reporting is the deliverable; pick Clearscope when consistent editorial quality across many writers is.
Full Clearscope vs Surfer SEO comparisonClearscope vs Frase
from $39 per month (Starter, billed yearly; $49 monthly)Frase is roughly a third of Clearscope's entry price and includes AI visibility tracking on its cheapest plan, but it meters seats and sites tightly and packs in far more surface area for the money. Clearscope does less and does it more carefully, with unlimited users and a cleaner editorial workflow. Small teams counting dollars should start with Frase; teams where writer headcount is the variable cost should model Clearscope's unlimited seats before assuming it is the expensive option.
Full Clearscope vs Frase comparisonClearscope vs SEOTesting
from $50 per month (Single Site)Both sit on top of your own Google Search Console data and both are built by small bootstrapped teams, but Clearscope acts before publication and SEOTesting acts after it. Clearscope shapes the draft and reports topic-level visibility across Google and AI answers; SEOTesting runs time-based and split tests to establish whether a change caused the result. At $50 per month with unlimited users, SEOTesting is an addition to a Clearscope stack rather than a competitor for the same budget.
Full Clearscope vs SEOTesting comparisonImplementation & onboarding
- Setup time
- Under an hour. Connect Google Search Console, install the Google Docs add-on or WordPress plugin, and run a first content report. Tracked Topics needs a little thought about which topics matter but far less setup than building a prompt set from scratch.
- Learning curve
- Low. The content grade is self-explanatory and the interface is deliberately sparse. The harder judgment is strategic: choosing topics worth owning, and resisting the urge to write to the grade instead of the reader.
- Onboarding
- Self-serve signup with a 14 day trial. A dedicated account manager is included from the Business tier; Enterprise adds custom agreements and crawler whitelisting.
- Migration notes
- Nothing published lives inside Clearscope, so leaving costs you historical topic and page tracking rather than any asset. Because Expand builds on your own Search Console data, the underlying performance history survives a switch even if the topic trend lines do not.
Platform, API & security
- Platforms
- Web appGoogle Docs add-onMicrosoft Word add-inWordPress plugin
- API
- Not prominently published on the pricing or product pages; teams planning programmatic use should confirm availability and scope with Clearscope directly.
- Compliance
- Not published in detail on the public site
- Data residency
- Not publicly specified.
- SSO
- Single sign-on is an Enterprise-tier feature.
- Security notes
- Requires read access to Google Search Console for the analytics and topic-tracking features; crawler whitelisting is offered at the Enterprise tier for sites that block unknown user agents.
Support & resources
- Channels
- Email supportDedicated account manager on Business and Enterprise
- Documentation
- A support and getting-started library covering each module, plus an unusually substantive blog that argues positions (topics over prompts, AEO tactics) rather than only publishing keyword bait.
- Community
- No dedicated user forum; support is vendor-direct, which is workable at this company size.
Company
- Founded
- 2016
- Headquarters
- Austin, Texas, US
- Ownership
- Privately held, bootstrapped
- Founders
- Bernard Huang, Kevin Su
- Employees
- Approximately 14 (2026, third-party estimate)
- Funding
- No outside funding disclosed; the founders describe the company as 100 percent bootstrapped and profitable.
Timeline
- 2016Founded in Austin by Bernard Huang and Kevin Su, bootstrapped from the start.
- 2019The Google Docs add-on and content grading workflow establish Clearscope as the editorial standard for content briefs.
- 2023Product expands from single-report optimization into content analytics and site-level monitoring.
- 2025Tracked Topics launches on September 30, monitoring discoverability across Google and AI chatbots including ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews.
- 2025AI Cited Pages content view ships, showing which pages AI answers actually cite.
- 2026Product reorganizes into named modules (Discover, Write, Optimize, Protect, Expand, Localize, Linking) and the company positions around Answer Engine Optimization alongside classic SEO.
Integrations
- Google Search Console
- Google Docs
- Microsoft Word
- WordPress
Frequently asked questions
10 questionsWhat does Clearscope do?
Clearscope analyzes the pages currently ranking for a query and grades your draft for topical coverage in real time, inside Google Docs, Word, WordPress, or its own editor. It also researches topic clusters, monitors published content for decay, and tracks how visible your topics and pages are across both Google and AI chatbots.
How much does Clearscope cost?
Essentials is $129 per month with 50 tracked prompts, 50 tracked pages, 20 topic explorations, and 20 drafts. Business is $399 per month with 300 prompts and pages and 50 topic explorations. Enterprise is custom. All plans include unlimited users and projects and a 14 day free trial.
Does Clearscope charge per seat?
No, and this is the most important thing about its pricing. Users, projects, and team members are unlimited on every plan, so a thirteen-person content team pays the same $129 as a solo writer. Against competitors that charge roughly $29 per extra seat, that flips the value calculation entirely once you have more than a handful of writers.
Can Clearscope track whether ChatGPT mentions my brand?
Yes. Tracked Prompts monitor brand mentions in chatbot responses, metered at 50 per month on Essentials and 300 on Business, and Tracked Topics reports topic-level share of voice across Google and AI platforms including ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews. The AI Cited Pages view shows which of your pages are actually being cited.
Why does Clearscope argue for tracking topics instead of prompts?
Because prompts are effectively infinite and unstable while topics are finite and plannable. Clearscope's position, argued at length on its blog, is that tracking a handful of prompts gives a noisy sample of a much larger space, whereas topic-level share of voice tells you whether you own a subject area. It is a defensible view, though buyers who need prompt-level evidence for a specific query will find the prompt allowances useful too.
What is query fan-out and why does Clearscope report it?
When an AI platform answers a question it typically runs several real web searches behind the scenes to assemble the answer. Those underlying searches are the query fan-out. Clearscope surfaces them because they are more actionable than the prompt itself: you can write pages targeting the searches the model is running, which is how you become a source rather than an also-ran.
Does Clearscope have a free trial or free plan?
A 14 day free trial is available on all plans. There is no permanently free tier. The trial is long enough to run a full editorial cycle, which is more than several competitors in this category offer.
Is Clearscope a replacement for Ahrefs or Semrush?
No. Clearscope has no backlink index, no site crawler, and no standalone keyword volume database. It is a content research, optimization, and visibility layer that assumes technical and link data comes from elsewhere, and it is usually one line item in a stack rather than the whole stack.
How many articles can I generate with Clearscope?
20 drafts per month on both Essentials and Business, with extra drafts sold as an add-on at $50 on Essentials and $20 on Business. That cap makes clear that Clearscope is priced as a research and quality tool, not an AI content-volume tool; teams generating at scale should look elsewhere.
Who owns Clearscope?
Clearscope is privately held and bootstrapped, founded in 2016 in Austin, Texas by Bernard Huang and Kevin Su, with no outside funding disclosed. Third-party estimates put the team at roughly fourteen people in 2026, which is small even by this category's standards.
Editorial verdict
Clearscope is the tool an editor picks and a CFO squints at, right up until someone counts the seats. Unlimited users on a $129 plan is a structural advantage that no per-seat competitor can argue away, and the grading workflow inside Google Docs remains the least intrusive version of this idea anyone has shipped. On AI search, Clearscope has done real work rather than slapping a badge on the homepage: Tracked Topics shipped in September 2025, AI Cited Pages answers the question that actually matters, and query fan-out reporting is more useful than another prompt counter. The reservations are metering and price steps. Twenty drafts a month at any tier and a three-times jump from Essentials to Business mean growing teams feel the ceiling early. Buy it if you have writers to coordinate; look at Frase if you have a budget to defend.
Written by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Awards, when shown, are judged against the published criteria in our methodology.