Over the last 2 years dozens of AI writing services have taken the content world by storm.
Each one promises more than the last, and the marketing hype behind it all? It’s unparalleled.
But in my experience, most of these AI writing services? They still have a long ways to go.
Despite many hours trying to find ways to make some of them useful for my workflow, and to save me time, using them has yet to prove fruitful for me.
Until now, that is.
I get dozens of unsolicited emails a week from people asking for links, guest posts, to be an affiliate, or try a new product out.
9 times out of 10 (or 99 times out of 100 to be more accurate), these emails are a waste of my time.
But a few weeks ago, I got one that caught my eye.
It was for a new AI writing service called Content at Scale, which is unique among all of those AI writing services.
It works in a different way than all of the others out there, and promises a different end goal: Fully SEO-optimized, long-form posts for content sites.
But could it possibly live up to lofty expectations?
The short answer is yes.
A resounding, and quite surprising, YES.
After a few weeks of using Content at Scale I’m blown away by it.
With each new output, I’d email my second-in-command Liz, and say “HOLY CRAP, look at this one!”
But how feasible is it for bloggers and freelance writers? It is it going to take jobs from real-world writers? And is it worth the comparatively high cost when compared to competing services?
We’re going to look at all of that and more in this Content at Scale review.
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Simply put, this is the only AI writing tool I can recommend for long-form content. It's not perfect, but it's as close to magic as I've seen from an AI tool. Highly recommended.
How Do AI Writing Services Work?
Before we can talk about Content at Scale specifically, we should address exactly how AI writing services generally work.
In basic terms, there’s a technology out there called GPT.
GPT stands for Generative Pre-Trained Transformer, which probably sounds like techno-mumob0-jumbo.
But essentially this is a machine learning tool that has scoured the internet and created a giant neural-network of language that’s been used around the web.
When Content at Scale first came out, it was leveraging GPT-3 technology from Open AI.
Around 10% of the internet had been reviewed within GPT-3, and then the technology takes all of that information it has learned and uses it to create predictive content.
Now we’re onto GPT-4 and it’s much smarter and more capable than the previous versions. In months, not years, it’s gone from good, to great.
Still sound confusing?
Basically, GPT-4 can take prompts, and then output content based on that prompt and what it’s learned through its machine-learned internet database.
This is important to know, because 9 out of 10 AI writing services are essentially just using a version of GPT.
Learn more about what it is here.
Companies like Jasper.AI or CopyAI build a software layer on top of the underlying technology, which is user-friendly enough for someone like me or you to get results from.
But generally speaking, they’re still not perfect. I’ve found Jasper for instance to be good at helping me create ideas for YouTube or blog headlines, but for creating actual long form content?
It’s clunky, and repetitive, and takes me more time to create worse content, than if I were to just write it myself from scratch.
Chat GPT is also seriously impressive, but it still struggles to create long-form content that sounds like it was actually written by a real person.
First Impressions of Content at Scale
Because of my experience with these other services, I was highly skeptical about testing Content at Scale.
Before getting started I was told that Content at Scale uses 3 different AI engines, natural language processing, and semantic analysis algorithms to pull it all off.
I’m not a technical person, so this sounds like a foreign language to me.
But what I heard was “AI writing that isn’t just a layer on top of GPT that can actually create long-form content that’s ready to publish.”
So at the very least, I had to give it a shot.
When you login to Content at Scale the user interface is pretty stripped down – in a good way.
This is a brand new company, so they still have a ways to go when it comes to user-interface and features, but the stripped-down feel makes it very easy to get started.
When you login, you’re taken to the projects page.
I treat each different website as a different project.
When you create a project it will ask you for:
- Project Name
- URL
- Project Context (A few words re: what the project is about)
- Target audience
- Number of posts a month
- Tone of voice
The project details screen within Content at Scale.
This helps the system get additional context about your site, and helps provide background information that will go into each post you create.
If you have content publication goals, the number of posts per month input will help you follow along to see if you’re on pace for your publishing goals.
This setup page is super easy to use and takes less than 2 minutes to fill out. I like that it doesn’t ask too much of you, which keeps you from getting bogged down as you’re beginning.
Project Settings for Content at Scale
If you go into the project settings tab after you initially fill this in, there’s more detail here so you can fine-tune your content even further.
I was actually pretty impressed by some of the options here.
You’ll have the ability to connect Content at Scale to your WordPress account, which is how you’re going to get the most out of using the software and publishing.
I will admit, I have some reservations about this as it relates to how Google feels about AI-driven content. So until I’ve done more testing myself, I’m hesitant to make this connection with my biggest websites.
This may be totally unfounded, but it’s all pretty new territory, so I’m trying to be extra cautious.
Additional page settings in Content at Scale.
Within the settings, you can update all of the things I mentioned in the setup before.
On top of that you can:
- Automatically add “Key Takeaways” – This is where Content at Scale will automatically call out important pieces of information and highlight them in a featured box within the post. You can toggle this on or off, and change the color of the box.
- You can have it include “Click to Tweet” boxes. This takes key quotes, and with the push of a button a reader can automatically tweet out the quote. I’ve used this in Location Rebel content in the past, and have always liked the way it works. So to have it be automatic? A nice value add.
- Automatic Table of Contents – Again, this is very useful. In the past, I’ve talked about how having a table of contents on longer posts can help with search results. So to have it easily do this, without the addition of an external plugin is fantastic.
- Call to Action – If you’re trying to do something specific with your traffic, you can add a CTA to either the very beginning or the very end of your posts. This is useful if you’re trying to direct people to say a landing page to get them to opt into an email list for instance.
As more people begin using Content at Scale, I do have concerns over whether using these features will be a clue to Google that it’s AI-driven content. But time will tell on that one.
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Creating a Post within Content at Scale
Ok, now the important stuff: creating content.
When you click “Add Content” within a project, the first prompt is deceivingly simple.
It asks you for a keyword and some additional context.
The content creation prompt is very simple, but the results you get are powerful.
For the keyword, you can also upload a CSV if you have more than one keyword you’d like to rank for.
Personally, I wish I could just comma separate a handful of them rather than having to go through the hassle of creating a separate CSV, but that’s not a huge deal.
In the “additional context” box, you have 280 characters to tell it everything else you’d like it to know about the post.
So if there are specific headers or a specific format/structure you’d like it to follow? This would be the place to tell it that.
The best way to detail how to do this is really to just give you an example all the way through.
To do this, I created a post for my cocktail niche site, Slightly Pretentious.
Keyword: How to Make an Espresso Martini
Additional Context: The post should start with an introduction to the espresso martini cocktail. It should then have a section about the history of the drink. And then it will have a recipe for an espresso martini along with exactly how to make the drink.
From there? I simply hit go.
Because of the extra analysis Content at Scale uses, it takes a little bit longer to create content than your typical AI writing service.
I’ve found it usually takes about 5 minutes to fully draft your content. So just prepare for the fact it isn’t instant.
But once it’s done?
Prepare to be truly blown away.
Editing a Content at Scale Post
Once I got my first post drafted, I was caught off guard. Content at Scale doesn’t just draft your content for you, it also provides an entire suite of SEO checks and tools to make sure your content is as optimized as possible.
You can see here all of the different SEO parameters it’s running through:
The fact is has these SEO tools built in is a huge value-add.
Looking at these, you certainly don’t need to get all green checks. I’d imagine if you did, it would feel like an SEO targetted post and perhaps a bit over-optimized. But it’s a great way to double-check the article and ensure you’re not missing anything.
Content at Scale provides a title and metadata, along with a place to upload a featured image.
When you connect this to WordPress, the idea is you can do everything within Content at Scale, and then simply have to hit publish within your blog backend.
Along with the SEO data, in the “Brief” section – it references all of the different sites it looked at in creating the post.
This is where it gathers information for the post content. How long should the post be? How many headings should there be? Media files etc.
It looks at all of the posts currently ranking highly for your keyword and makes a recommendation based on those posts.
Editing your post is super easy, and it feels just like you’re editing your content within a WordPress editor.
Once you’re happy with where it’s at? You can hit the “review” tab and then “request a plagiarism scan” to ensure that your content is unique and you won’t get dinged by Google.
The plagiarism scan within Content at Scale
Overall the process of creating, editing, and publishing content is by far the easiest and most enjoyable system I’ve seen from any AI writing service.
Not only is it the smoothest to use, but the results are the best as well.
Simply put, this is the only AI writing tool I can recommend for long-form content. It's not perfect, but it's as close to magic as I've seen from an AI tool. Highly recommended.
How Good is the Information You Get from Content at Scale?
So without any adjustments, how good is the AI-written content from Content at Scale?
Honestly? It’s pretty damn good….for AI.
It’s the best I’ve seen, but it’s still not perfect.
If you’re a good writer, and especially if you’re a blogger who is used to writing authoritative posts with some personality, you may struggle with Content at Scale.
It’s just not on that level.
But what I’ve found is that with a little human editing, it’s very easy to get the content to that level.
I’ve found that tweaking the intro and conclusion, and then throwing in a few bits of personality or a couple of related stories in the body is all you need to really make one of these mostly AI-written articles your own.
But if you’re working on a high-volume niche site, and you just need content that’s “good enough?”
There’s simply no better AI tool out there that I’ve seen than Content at Scale.
And it’s not even close.
In order to illustrate this, I left my espresso martini post up on the site, mostly unedited – so you can see exactly what it looks like with no additional writing.
This post is 70% of the way there. What I’d typically do from here is add a couple of personal stories from my experience with the cocktail, and maybe a few tips I’ve learned about making them, but I’m impressed at how useful this came straight out of the gate.
Data Accuracy with Content at Scale
Aside from just poor writing, the biggest issue I’ve had with other writing services is inaccurate information.
If I plugged “how to make an espresso martini” into Jasper, and told it to give me a paragraph about the history of the drink?
There’s a good chance it would make something up that simply isn’t true.
And that’s where you really run into trouble, as you have to spend so much time fact-checking your ai tool, that it negates the benefits of using it.
I’ve created about half a dozen posts with Content at Scale and I’ve fact-checked every single one, and so far? All of the data has been 100% accurate.
Even this recipe for how to make this drink? It’s exactly how I’d do it, which is really cool.
Different Types of Content using C@S
I’ve now created two posts for each of my sites (most of which remain unpublished as of writing this), in order to get an idea of how well they work for different types of content.
For cocktail-related stuff?
I’ve found them to be fantastic. I can see Content at Scale allowing me to very quickly scale the number of cocktail recipes on Slightly Pretentious, while still easily being able to add my own spin and stories to each one to make sure things remain unique.
I’ve tried doing a couple “best of” round-up posts for my golf site, and was shocked at how well they turned out.
By using a prompt like:
Write a post about [keyword]. Include sections for what is a [keyword], pros and cons of [keyword], and a section each on [product 1], [product 2], [product 3], [product 4], and [product 5].
The result was a post that was about 70% ready to publish. I found it repeated itself a bit with the benefits of each product, and I’ll have to do a little editing to make each product is a bit more unique from one another.
But it found the actual data on each of these products and wrote about it in a relatively informed way.
From there, I wanted to test out a couple ideas for Location Rebel content, including using it to help with newsletter content.
And the result? Once again, it is surprisingly detailed and well-written.
You still need to add the personality and stuff that makes you, you, but the average person probably wouldn’t notice that it wasn’t written by me.
Not to mention the tips I asked it to provide? They were really good pieces of advice! And a couple were things I hadn’t even thought about before, which was extra surprising.
So to be clear Content at Scale is great for keyword-driven blog posts, but I’ve also found it to be useful for other types of long-form content as well.
Simply put, this is the only AI writing tool I can recommend for long-form content. It's not perfect, but it's as close to magic as I've seen from an AI tool. Highly recommended.
Content at Scale Pricing
By now you may be thinking “ok cool, this sounds great, let’s go!”
Where do I sign up and how much does it cost?
That’s the kicker, Content at Scale isn’t cheap.
You can find a lot of AI writing services for less than $100 a month.
Because of the technology that Content at Scale uses, as well as the fact each generated post costs them a not insignificant amount of money, their service is quite a bit more expensive than other products.
The Beta pricing right now starts out at $249 for 4 optimized posts a month, and moves up to $1,500+ for 60 posts.
Seems like a lot of money for a piece of software.
But when you consider how much it would cost you to pay a writer to write 50 posts in a month? It all of a sudden seems much more reasonable.
That said, as I’ve mentioned throughout this review, the content is good enough out of the box for a lower level-niche site looking to create and index a lot of content quickly.
But if you’re going to use this on one of your authoritative sites? At the very least you’ll want to plan to hire a writer to massage these a bit to add personality, double-check everything for accuracy, and protect yourself against algorithm changes.
Content at Scale vs. Jasper.ai
Jasper is the other AI tool I have the most experience with, and with it recently being valued as a unicorn company (over $1b valuation), I imagine this will be a frame of reference for many people considering investing in Content at Scale.
How does it compare?
I’ve had a Jasper membership for a year now, mostly because I keep telling myself I’m going to write a review of it.
A year in? I still haven’t written that review.
I’ve had Content at Scale for a week, and I couldn’t write this review fast enough.
That’s how excited I am for C@S.
Jasper is a bit clunkier to use and has a much bigger learning curve if you want to get high-quality results out of it.
You can write long-form content with Jasper, but the quality isn’t anywhere close to that of Content at Scale, and it takes a lot of work on your part to figure out how to get content that is actually publishable.
Where I find Jasper most useful is in helping with headline ideas, and short-form ad content. It’s better than Content at Scale for short-form, copywriting/persuasive content.
So if you’re looking for an AI tool to help you with your Facebook ads or YouTube descriptions? Jasper is a better fit.
But if you’re looking to create long-form content, Content at Scale blows Jasper, or anything else I’ve seen out of the water.
Should Freelance Writers Be Concerned?
Over the last couple of years, I’ve received countless questions from people asking some variation of “Is AI taking over the freelance writing world?”
And the answer is mostly no.
Content at Scale is by far the best AI tool I’ve come across for long-form content.
But to get the most out of it, you still need a writer to help polish and refine things if you want truly world-class content.
Yes, I do think this tool may take some jobs from the lowest levels of freelance writers (like SEO writers, for instance.)
But there is, and will continue to be very strong demand for real, human writers, that can write high-quality, intellectually stimulating, engaging content for businesses, blogs, and every other place on the internet that needs content writing.
Where I see AI writing tools like Content at Scale thriving most? Is in the hands of high-quality writers. If you’re good at what you do, and you can easily edit and refine a very rough draft. I could see Content at Scale tripling your output with very little additional effort from you.
This will not replace a world-class writer, but in the hands of a world-class writer? Watch out. You’re going to see a level of content creation that will be hard to match.
Final Thoughts on Content at Scale: Should You Buy It?
By now we’re over 3k words in, I’m guessing you have an idea of whether Content at Scale is for you.
Of all the AI tools I’ve tested? Content at Scale is by far the most interesting and most well-executed for what I’m most interested in.
The AI dream has always been high-quality long-form content, and this is the first tool that I’ve found which is starting to deliver on that promise.
The outputs from it are very good, and for certain sites, will be suitable for publishing right out of the box. But for most people, and specifically content marketers that truly care about putting out the best quality possible, it will serve as a starting point.
Content at Scale will get you a solid first draft, and then from there it’s up to you to add your own personality, stories, and opinions to truly make the content unique and high quality.
It’s taken my time for creating certain types of posts on each of my sites and cut it down by about 2/3rds – which is pretty damn impressive.
For now, I’m going to keep testing Content at Scale out and publishing some content using it on my smaller niche sites. And if it continues to impress? Then I’ll keep using and refining across all of my sites.
But I have a feeling you’re going to be very impressed, and if you’ve been looking for an AI-driven tool to help write SEO-optimized, high-quality long from content? I truly believe Content at Scale is the single best tool on the market.
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Questions? Just drop a comment, happy to help give additional insight into how the software works and my experience with it!
Simply put, this is the only AI writing tool I can recommend for long-form content. It's not perfect, but it's as close to magic as I've seen from an AI tool. Highly recommended.
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Sean Ogle
Sean Ogle is the Founder of Location Rebel where he has spent the last 12+ years teaching people how to build online businesses that give them the freedom to do more of the things they like to do in life. When he's not in the coffee shops of Portland, or the beaches of Bali, he's probably sneaking into some other high-class establishment where he most certainly doesn't belong.Join over 40,000 people who have taken our 6 part freelance writing course. Sign up below and let’s do this together.
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