ContentShake AI Review — All the Key Pros and Cons

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In this ContentShake AI Review, I take you through the key pros and cons of Semrush’s AI writing tool — and help you decide if it’s right for your content creation needs.

Let’s begin with a quick overview of exactly what ContentShake AI is.

ContentShake AI: a quick overview

ContentShake AI is a content creation tool developed by Semrush, a well-known SEO and digital marketing platform. It’s designed to help users — even those with little writing or SEO experience — create high-quality blog posts and articles quickly and easily.

The tool uses artificial intelligence to guide you through the entire content creation process — from researching a topic to structuring, writing and publishing an article.

You can use ContentShake AI to:

But just how good is it?

I’m going to help you answer that question, starting with a walkthrough of what I think are the key pros of the tool, and following this up with a look at some of its key cons.

The pros of using ContentShake AI

1. It’s great for generating content ideas

One of the best features in ContentShake AI is its Topic Finder tool. As its name suggests, this helps you find ideas to write about for your blog or website.

The tool recommends topics to write about based on real-time SEO data from Semrush, including search volume, keyword difficulty and search intent. This approach helps ensure that the topics you decide to write about are:

And because the Topic Finder pulls data directly from live search results, the suggestions provided are always up to date — unlike those of many competing AI tools that make content recommendations based on older or static datasets.

When testing the Topic Finder, I particularly liked the way that each of its suggestions was labeled in a way that gave me an immediate sense of its potential.

For example, when I was exploring ideas in the print-on-demand niche, ContentShake AI highlighted ‘luxury print on demand clothing’ as a ‘low-hanging fruit’ topic — meaning that it commands a high search volume (62K searches per month) combined with moderate keyword difficulty (37%).

ContentShake also highlighted that the phrase has a good mix of informational, commercial and transactional intent, signalling strong potential for both attracting traffic and converting readers.

With all of this information presented in a clean, neatly-presented format, ContentShake definitely makes it easy to spot topic opportunities worth pursuing.

2. It helps you create structured SEO content briefs quickly

ContentShake’s SEO content brief generator gives you a great way to create clear and coherent article structures and briefs.

You enter a target keyword into it and the tool automatically pulls in top-ranking competitor content for comparison. From there, you can choose which competitor articles to base your article’s structure on.

The content brief generator then lets you customize key elements of your brief — including the title, word count, secondary keywords and meta description.

It then generates a suggested outline for your article, which you can easily edit to match your own voice or audience.

Overall, the feature is extremely useful for content managers creating briefs for their teams, commissioning editors assigning work to freelancers or solo content creators who want to turn keyword ideas into actionable, SEO-ready outlines — fast.

Once you’re happy with the brief, you can export it to Google Docs or continue writing within ContentShake itself.

3. It’s really good at improving existing content

ContentShake AI doesn’t just generate brand new articles for you, it also helps you improve your existing content, by highlighting issues with:

It also provides an overall article quality score, showing you how well your article is optimized and how it will resonate with your audience.

These content checking features are particularly well suited to small businesses without in-house SEO or editorial teams — they go some of the way towards providing that sort of expertise.

4. It lets you draw directly from top-performing competitor content — without directly plagiarising!

One of the best things about ContentShake AI is the way it brings competitor data directly into its article editor.

As you build or write your article in ContentShake, the editor displays a curated panel of competitor insights — including their articles’ titles, introductions, structural outlines, notable facts, images and key data points (see my screenshot below to get a sense of how this works).

This means you don’t have to open multiple browser tabs or perform multiple searches to get a sense of what you need to write about; relevant content inspiration is surfaced for you in one place, helping to guide your writing.

The great thing about this approach is that it allows you to model your content on what’s already ranking well in search results. If a competitor has structured their piece a certain way or opened with a compelling stat or hook, you can draw from those techniques to shape your own article.

Crucially, it gives you an immediate sense of the formats and angles that search engines and readers are already responding well to.

What makes ContentShake AI especially clever here is its built-in ‘Rephrase’ button next to each competitor excerpt — this lets you rewrite the original sentence or paragraph in a fresh, original way. That matters because directly copying someone else’s content verbatim amounts to plagiarism. But with the rephrasing tool, you can ethically “steal like a writer” — borrowing structure and inspiration while generating content that remains unique.

5. It lets you create multiple brand voices

Another excellent ContentShake AI feature is its brand voice system, which lets you create up to 50 different voices.

A brand voice is essentially the tone, style and personality associated with your writing — whether that’s conversational and warm, formal and technical, or direct and persuasive. And being able to define multiple voices makes it easy to tailor content for different brands, products or audience types.

(As a small bonus, ContentShake automatically gives each voice a quirky name — like The ‘Cheerful Strategist Voice’ or ‘The Magnetic Advisor Voice’ — which you can keep or rename as you like.)

Each voice can be fine-tuned in useful ways. You can set the readability level — from simple, everyday language all the way up to content aimed at university-level readers. You can also define up to three reader personas for each voice, based on their occupation, main problem and goal. This helps the AI shape content that sounds highly relevant to the people you’re writing for.

Few competing tools offer this level of flexibility. For example, ChatGPT has no built-in brand voice system — meaning that maintaining a consistent tone with the platform requires repeated, manual prompting (something that can quickly become tedious). Jasper AI does include a brand voice feature, but limits you to just three voices on its $59 plan.

6. It’s decent value and similarly priced to other AI tools

For $60 per month, ContentShake AI offers a strong mix of AI writing and SEO support in one tool. It gives you access to content ideas, keyword suggestions, competitor insights, optimization features and article generation — all in a single, easy-to-use platform.

While there are cheaper tools available, and others that offer more advanced features or higher article limits, ContentShake sits in a reasonable middle ground. It’s not the cheapest option, but it’s far from overpriced — especially when you consider that the content you create with it draws from Semrush’s huge SEO dataset.

For bloggers, marketers and small teams who need guided content creation without stacking multiple subscriptions, I’d argue that ContentShake AI delivers solid value at a fair monthly price.

7. It lets you publish directly to WordPress

ContentShake AI provides a built-in WordPress integration, making it easy to go from draft to published post in a couple of clicks.

Once your article is ready, you simply click “Publish to WordPress,” connect your site (using a secure plugin) and your new content is transferred over — complete with formatting, headings and images intact.

This feature is especially helpful for bloggers, freelance writers and content managers who publish regularly to WordPress. It removes the need to copy and paste content, clean up formatting and re-insert media.

For context, ChatGPT doesn’t offer any built-in WordPress publishing — you’ll need to manually copy your content into the editor. Jasper can connect to WordPress, but only through third-party automation tools like Make.com or n8n, which require extra configuration time.

ContentShake’s native integration keeps things simpler and more efficient here.

8. You can use it for free up to 50 times a month (via a Chrome extension)

ContentShake AI provides a free Chrome extension that lets you rephrase and improve text directly on any web page — including emails, social posts or blog drafts in platforms like Google Docs.

It’s a lightweight tool that brings the core rewriting features of ContentShake into your browser, making it useful for quick edits without needing to open the full app.

You can use the extension up to 50 times per month for free, with no subscription required — a generous limit for light users or those wanting to test the tool before committing to the paid version.

At time of writing, the extension has a 4.5-star rating on the Chrome Web Store, with users praising how easy it is to use and how useful it is for polishing short-form content. I use it quite often myself and find it a very handy tool to have — especially for tweaking sentences in Google Docs or cleaning up emails before sending.

OK, so those are my key pros of using ContentShake AI.

If you’d like to try it out, you can access a 7-day free trial of it here.

But what are its downsides?

The cons of using ContentShake AI

1. Its five-article limit for SEO-boosted articles is not very generous

ContentShake AI lets you create two types of articles: regular articles and SEO-boosted ones. Regular articles are written by the AI based on your keyword input, and you can create an unlimited number of these each month. They’re great for general content creation but don’t include advanced SEO features.

SEO-boosted articles, by contrast, make use of Semrush’s proprietary SEO data — including competitor insights, keyword recommendations etc. — and as you might expect, the output they provide is more likely to rank highly in search results.

Now, on the standard ContentShake AI plan, you can only create five of these SEO-boosted articles per month, which may feel restrictive if you’re a high-output blogger or part of a busy content team.

You do have options here, though. You can buy an extra pack of 10 SEO-boosted articles for $30, or, if you subscribe to a full Semrush plan, your monthly limit automatically increases to 20 SEO-boosted articles. That’s a helpful upgrade — but even then, it may not fully meet the needs of users producing large volumes of search-friendly content.

2. You can’t upload document or data files

For me, a key limitation of ContentShake AI is that it doesn’t allow you to upload content contained within word processing files (Google and Word documents etc.) for analysis and improvement. Any copy you want to work on with ContentShake AI needs to be copied and pasted manually into the tool, which can slow things down quite a bit.

ContentShake doesn’t support spreadsheet uploads either, which puts it at a disadvantage with generative AI tools that can process data from CSVs or Excel files. If your workflow involves creating content based on insights from tables, survey data, or messy research notes, you won’t be able to use ContentShake to parse that information and structure content around it.

This makes ContentShake AI less useful for data-driven content — like reports, trend summaries and analysis pieces.

3. You can only change your audience settings 3 times a day

ContentShake AI lets you define your target audience by setting a preferred location and language. This helps the platform generate relevant content ideas based on regional interests and search behavior.

However, you can only update these settings three times per day.

For most users focused on a single market or language, this limit probably won’t be an issue. But if you regularly produce content for different regions, or if you create content in multiple languages, it will quickly become annoying.

4. Its 5,000-word limit isn’t ideal for VERY long-form writing

In theory, ContentShake AI lets you set article lengths between 1,000 and 5,000 words, which works well for most blog posts and online articles. But on occasions when I asked it to write a 5,000-word article, it only output around 3,000 words. It doesn’t seem to like providing really long-form content.

This can be a downside if you’re trying to create something big like an eBook, a detailed guide, or a long opinion piece. Other tools, not least ChatGPT, are better suited to that. Sudowrite is another good alternative for writing stories or very long essays — it provides dedicated tools for plotting and pacing longer projects.

5. It supports fewer languages than some competing AI content generation tools

ContentShake AI lets you generate content in seven languages: English, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish.

(Helpfully, it also gives you the choice to use either British English or American English.)

Still, its language range is relatively limited compared to other tools. Jasper supports over 80 languages; Surfer SEO supports 14 languages; and ChatGPT provides strong support for 15-20 (and basic support for many more).

For now, ContentShake AI’s lack of more comprehensive multilingual support may nudge international content producers in the direction of alternative products.

6. It doesn’t store reusable brand or product info

As I mentioned previously, ContentShake AI does a good job at maintaining your brand voice in a consistent way — it lets you upload writing samples to help it do so. But it doesn’t offer a way to save and reuse important brand or product information.

Some tools, such as Copy.ai, offer more comprehensive ‘brand kit’ features, which let you store key details like product descriptions, company facts and messaging guidelines in one place; the AI can then automatically pull from that information when generating content. For example, if you always refer to your service as “a fast, no-code analytics platform,” Copy.ai will remember and reuse that phrasing — but ContentShake won’t.

So while ContentShake AI can keep your tone of voice consistent, you’ll still need to retype or copy-paste brand-specific info into the tool every time you start a new article. This sounds like a small thing, but it can soon become a time consuming one.

7. Developing content feels more structured than conversational

ContentShake AI is designed for fast, focused content creation, and that’s reflected in how you interact with it; to me, the overall workflow feels more guided than freeform.

Unlike ChatGPT, where your content evolves through a fluid back-and-forth exchange, ContentShake’s process is more segmented — with AI suggestions appearing in side panels or pop-ups, rather than unfolding directly in the main text area. You can steer the output a bit, but not quite with the same conversational rhythm.

This may suit users who want structure and speed — but those who enjoy a looser, more interactive style of co-writing may find it a bit less flexible.

So those are my key pros and cons of ContentShake AI.

I’ll wrap things up with an overall conclusion of the platform.

ContentShake AI review verdict

To sum things up, ContentShake AI is a well-rounded content creation tool that does a great job of combining AI writing with real SEO data. Its Topic Finder, optimization tools and brand voice features make it particularly useful for bloggers, marketers and small teams aiming to create structured, search-friendly articles without having to constantly switch between multiple tools.

The main reason I’d recommend ContentShake boils down to the way it simplifies the SEO writing process — it gives you topic ideas, article structure and optimization feedback in one place. Its deep integration with Semrush and its access to the platform’s wealth of SEO data gives it an edge over many general-purpose AI tools when it comes to producing content that’s actually built to rank.

That said, it’s not without its limitations. The cap on SEO-boosted articles, its lack of an option to upload content for analysis and its slightly rigid editing experience may be drawbacks for some. And if you need broad multilingual support or want full creative freedom over every paragraph, there are more flexible tools out there.

But overall, I feel ContentShake AI delivers strong value for money — and for anyone focused on SEO-friendly blog content, it’s a platform that’s easy to recommend.

As always, I recommend trying before buying — and if you’d like to see if ContentShake AI is right for you, you can avail of a 7-day free trial of the tool here.

Key features of ContentShake AI