Tilly vs Surfer SEO

Surfer helps people who write: you bring a draft and it shows you how to make it compete, then tracks your brand in Google and AI answers.

Pick Surfer if you have a writer. Pick Tilly if nobody is writing. Tilly reads your product pages, reviews and customer questions, picks the topics your buyers search, writes the posts in your voice and publishes them to your Shopify blog when you approve, with SEO fixes and a weekly AI search check, for $79 a month. Try the free audit: paste your store URL and see in about a minute what Tilly would fix first.

Surfer SEO is a tool for writing and optimising SEO content, with plans counted in documents. source, checked 25 September 2026

You or your writer create and optimise documents in Surfer: 120 a month on Discovery, which adds an AI SEO assistant and humanizer, and 360 on Standard, which adds a plagiarism checker and rank drop detection. Pro adds 1-click internal linking, it tracks brand visibility across ChatGPT, Gemini and AI Overviews, and it is made and hosted in Europe.

Each app’s cells come from its own Shopify listing or pricing page, linked beside the words. “Not listed” means we did not find it there, not that the app cannot do it. Tilly’s column is our own product.

Surfer's column is read from its pricing page, which lists prices billed yearly. Surfer has no Shopify App Store listing we could read, so the rating rows are empty rather than filled from elsewhere.

Surfer publishes yearly-billed prices: Discovery at $49 a month, Standard at $99, Pro at $182 and Peace of Mind at $299, plus AI Search Analytics on its own at $82. The plans are capped by documents: Discovery lets you create or optimise 120 and track 10 pages, and Standard 360.

Tilly's Store plan is $49 a month billed monthly for 500 credits, after 100 free credits. A blog post with its cover image is 15 credits; the SEO audit is free. The same credits also pay for emails, ads and page fixes, because Tilly is priced on what gets built rather than per tool.

Put plainly: Surfer's price buys guidance for your writer across a number of documents; Tilly's buys the posts themselves, and the rest of your marketing on the same balance.

The last table prices the same store on both. Semrush and Alli AI do not write the posts: they research and fix, and the writing stays with you or a writer. Surfer helps you write and optimise; Enrich Labs and Tilly write the posts themselves. Surfer’s prices are billed yearly.

This is Tilly's page, so here is where Surfer is the stronger choice, first. source, checked 25 September 2026

• Surfer tracks how your brand appears across ChatGPT, Gemini and AI Overviews as a product in its own right; Tilly does not report AI search visibility.
• It works with any writer on any site. Surfy, its AI SEO assistant, and a humanizer come with even the Discovery plan, and your own writer keeps control of every sentence.
• Its Standard plan adds a plagiarism checker and rank drop detection, useful when several people write for the site.
• Surfer is made and hosted in Europe, which matters to some teams with data residency requirements. Tilly makes no such claim.

Tilly writes the post, not the brief. The SEO agent picks a keyword cluster and the one persona question it answers, outlines from what the top results cover and what they miss, and writes in your brand's voice with links to the right products and your other posts.

It learns from your own results. Every night it reads what each email, ad, post and page change earned, keeps the patterns your numbers back up, and writes the next piece with them, so a winning ad angle can become an email subject line and a product-page headline. Surfer guides a writer page by page; Tilly learns from what your posts earned and writes the next post, email and ad with it. (How the loop works.)

Two more things sit in the same place: Tilly asks AI assistants the questions your buyers ask and shows whether they name your store or a competitor (more on AI search), and it keeps a record of every edit to your theme, products, pages and menus, so a change in sales can be read against what changed.

It publishes. Posts go to your Shopify blog with the cover image, meta title, description and internal links in place, after you approve them. There is no copying from an editor into Shopify, which is the step where many drafts stall.

It knows your customers. Keywords are grouped by the questions your personas actually ask, found from your reviews and your store, rather than by search volume alone. Two posts about the same ingredient can be written for two different buyers.

It hands the post on. New posts go to the email calendar so your list hears about them, and a post that starts to slip in the rankings gets a refresh suggested.

It fixes the site too. The SEO audit looks for missing or duplicate meta, missing product and article schema, thin collection pages, broken links and missing alt text, writes the fix for each, and lets you approve meta rewrites in batches. The audit costs nothing.

Nothing needs to move. If you keep Surfer for a writer's own articles, Tilly can publish its posts alongside them on the same Shopify blog.

If you are replacing Surfer, keep a list of the pages you optimised with it and their target keywords. Connecting Google Search Console lets Tilly see your real queries and the pages that nearly rank, which is where it looks for quick wins first.

Run the free SEO audit before you decide. It lists missing meta, schema, thin collection pages and broken links, each with the fix written, and costs nothing.

Then approve a single post and let it settle for a few weeks. Compare its impressions and clicks in Search Console with a post your writer optimised in Surfer, on similar keywords, before choosing where the next month's posts come from.