Tilly vs Surfer SEO

Surfer is a writing and optimisation tool for people who write. You bring a draft or a topic, and it tells you how to shape the page to compete, then tracks how your brand appears in Google and in AI answers. Tilly takes the writing off your hands: it chooses the topic from your customers' questions, writes the post, makes the cover and publishes it to your Shopify blog when you approve.

Choose Surfer if you have a writer, in-house or freelance, and want their work to rank better. Choose Tilly if nobody is writing at all, or if you want the blog to argue the same way as your emails and ads without briefing anyone.

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.

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 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.