AI Blog Writer Tools, Sorted by What They Ask You First

Five of the nine pages ranking for ai blog writer are the tools themselves, and the useful difference between them isn't the model or the marketing. It's the form. Grammarly's blog post generator asks you three things, an audience, a short description with key points, and a tone. Manus asks for a target keyword, an audience, a goal, brand context, a length, a tone and "any sources". Everything the first draft will contain has to come through one of those boxes, so the tool with the longer form produces the draft with more in it, and the tool with the short form produces the draft you'll spend the afternoon filling.

That's the direct answer. Pick by the form, then check that the free allowance covers one post at the length you write. The rest of this piece is every ranking tool's input fields, outputs, free tier and entry price from its own pages on 15 September 2026, followed by the one thing the practitioner essay at position eight gets right that none of the vendor pages mention, which is that a first draft "lacks examples and story-telling, and statistics" for the plain reason that no form has a field for them.

What Each Tool Asks For Before It Writes

Read the second column first. It's the only one that predicts the draft.

Two things jump out of that table for me.

The first is that only two of the six forms have a keyword field, Simplified and Manus. Grammarly's generator, which sits on the results page for a keyword that has "SEO" in half its related searches, has no place to type the phrase you want to rank for. You can put it in the description box, and I would, but the tool isn't asking, which tells you what it thinks the job is.

The second is that only one form asks for sources. Manus lists "any sources" last in its suggestion, and nothing else on the page asks at all. Hold that thought, because it's the whole next section.

The Three Things No Form Asks For

Andrew Chen has been blogging for over ten years and his essay at position eight is the only page here written by someone who publishes rather than sells. His verdict on the first draft is one sentence. It "lacks examples and story-telling, and statistics".

I'd add a fourth, which he also names, current data. So here's the same table turned round. For each thing a draft is missing, which input field on which tool could have supplied it?

That's the honest shape of the category. The draft is missing exactly the things that make a post worth reading, and the forms mostly have nowhere to put them. Simplified's form is the most complete of the pure generators, with a keyword, a tone, a language and a length, and it still has no field for a fact. Its page promises "plagiarism free content" and "a full blog article in less than 5 minutes", and both can be true of a post that contains nothing you'd want to cite.

Chen's own workaround is instructive and cheap. He uses the model for what it "excels" at, which in his words is "generating outlines of blog posts, making lists of topics, and creating a bunch of questions", with a prompt along the lines of "15 questions that someone might ask me about this topic". Then he writes. The model gets the scaffolding and he supplies the examples and the statistics himself, which is the order I'd use too, and the reasons it fails in the other order are in where AI for writing quietly fails.

Free Allowances, Measured Against One Post

The related searches under this query are mostly "free", so here's what free buys, one post at a time.

Simplified gives 1,000 words a month and its own length slider starts at 500 and ends at 3,000. So the free tier is two of the shortest posts the tool offers, or a third of the longest. One real post, roughly.

Grammarly's free plan is metered in prompts rather than words, 100 a month. A post that takes one generate and a few rewrites might use five to ten prompts, which is my guess rather than anything Grammarly publishes, so call it ten to twenty posts a month on the free tier. Generous. The catch is the form, which has no keyword or length field, so what you get back is a post about the description you typed, at whatever length the model felt like.

HubSpot's free writer needs a HubSpot account, the free tier is one blog in Content Hub with "Up to 100 blog posts, 20 authors, and 50 tags", and the page is careful to say "Most generative features are paid". If you already run a HubSpot site, fine. If you don't, you're being offered a free pen on condition you move house.

Manus doesn't publish a free figure and says on its own page not to treat it as unlimited. Jasper is a seven-day trial and then $69 a seat a month, or $708 a year on the annual rate, for a tool whose use-case page doesn't list its input fields. Its pricing page sells brand voices and knowledge assets instead, which are a form of the sources field, and my guess is that's where the money goes.

The Paid Prices, And Two That Don't Match

Grammarly's home page says Pro is "$12 USD / member / month, billed annually" or "$30 when billed monthly", which is $144 a year against $360. The plans page shows only the twelve. I keep finding this pattern across the writing tool subscriptions and I'll keep pointing it out, because for a tool you might use for one project the monthly figure is the real one.

Simplified's Starter is stranger. The visible text says $79 a month for "100K AI words" on one seat, and the page's own structured data lists $79 as the annual rate and $59 as the monthly one, which is the reverse of how its Pro and Business tiers run. I don't know which is right. I'd budget $79 and be pleased if it's $59.

Then the roundup at position four, AIOSEO's seven best generators, which ranks its own plugin first and discloses it. It lists Jasper at "$59/month per seat", which is Jasper's annual rate presented without the annual commitment. Not wrong, just the smaller number.

The Roundup Ranks Its Own Product First

That AIOSEO piece is 3,500 words, updated 20 January 2026, and says "I judged each tool on these four criteria". The criteria are output quality, ease of use, SEO capability and workflow integration, and the tool that won on all four is the one the author's company makes, with "Plans start at $49.50/year".

I don't think that's dishonest. It's disclosed, and a plugin that sits inside WordPress genuinely does integrate with a WordPress workflow better than a web app does. But it's worth knowing that the only ranked list on this results page is a vendor's, and that its ranking criterion "output quality" is asserted rather than shown. No draft is reproduced. No prompt is given. That's the same gap as the vendor pages, from the other side.

Where I'd Actually Use One

Judgment, not a test.

For the outline and the question list, any of them, and Grammarly's free tier is the cheapest way to get there. Chen's use of the model is the one I recognise, and an outline is the part of the job where the missing examples and statistics don't matter yet because you haven't written anything.

For the first draft of a post that has to contain facts, only the tools with a sources field, which today means Manus, and even then I'd want to see the sources it used rather than trust the "live SERP analysis" line. The ones without that field will hand you a draft that reads fine and cites nothing, and the work of putting the numbers in is the work you were trying to skip.

For the publishing step, none of them, and that's a different article. If what you want is a tool that writes and posts on a schedule, the risks are about cadence and approval rather than the form, and I went through the settings to switch off in the automatic blogging piece.

My concern with the whole category is the sentence Simplified uses as a selling point, five minutes to a full article. The five minutes is real. What it measures is how little the tool needed from you, and a draft that needed nothing from you contains nothing from you.

Does Google Accept AI-Written Blogs

Four of the six People Also Ask questions under this query are about Google, so here's Google, from its own guidance on AI-generated content, posted 8 February 2023 and still the document its help pages point to.

"Appropriate use of AI or automation is not against our guidelines." And the line I'd put on the wall, "Using AI doesn't give content any special gains. It's just content. If it is useful, helpful, original, and satisfies aspects of E-E-A-T, it might do well in Search. If it doesn't, it might not."

The other half of the same page is the boundary. "Using automation, including AI, to generate content with the primary purpose of manipulating ranking in search results is a violation of our spam policies." So Google's boundary is drawn around purpose, and which tool typed the words is beside the point.

Can Google tell? The page says "We have a variety of systems, including SpamBrain, that analyze patterns and signals to help us identify spam content, however it is produced." That's a claim about detecting spam, and it's careful not to be a claim about detecting AI. I'd read it the same way. A post with no examples, no stories and no statistics has a pattern whoever made it, and that pattern is what the draft table above predicts.

On disclosure, Google says AI disclosures are "useful for content where someone might think 'How was this created?'", and that "Giving AI an author byline is probably not the best way" to do it. A line at the bottom is the reasonable version.

Questions That Come Up

Can AI write a blog for me? A draft, yes, in minutes, from any tool on this page. A blog, in the sense of posts people come back for, only if you supply the examples and the numbers, because the forms above have nowhere to put them and the draft won't invent good ones.

Which AI is best for blog writing? By the form, Manus asks for the most and Grammarly the least. By price, Grammarly's free tier is the cheapest usable one. By the roundup, its own plugin, which I'd weigh accordingly. I'd pick the one whose input form has a field for the thing your posts are missing.

Can I legally publish a book written by AI? On Amazon KDP, yes, with a disclosure if the text was generated and none if you wrote it and used a tool to improve it. I self-publish and went through the exact definitions in the AI writing generator piece, and they map onto blog posts the same way, generated versus assisted.

Can Google tell if a blog is written by AI? Google says it detects spam "however it is produced" and doesn't claim to detect AI as such. See the section above.

Does Google accept AI-written blogs? Yes, in its own words, when the use is appropriate and the content is useful. No, when the purpose is manipulating rankings.

How can I tell if someone wrote something using AI? Look for what's missing rather than what's there. Chen's three, examples, stories and statistics, are the tell, and a post that has all three usually had a person in it somewhere.

The Form I'd Fill In

Whichever tool you pick, fill in the fields it doesn't have.

Put the keyword in the description box if there's no keyword box. Paste two sources into the key points field if there's no sources field. Type the example yourself. The draft that comes back will be about as good as what you put in the form, which is the plainest description of these tools I can give.