What Surfer does well
Surfer pulls the terms and structure from the pages already ranking for a query and scores your draft against them, so you can see which subtopics and phrases to include. That needs a SERP data set and it is genuinely useful for content teams.
Where it stops
It is a paid content tool: it does not check whether your site is reachable, indexable, or readable by AI crawlers, and it does not watch a page over time. It also needs a live SERP to work, which is a data cost we cannot honestly reproduce.
What Shipwork does instead
- Free on-page check: keyword in the title, H1, first 100 words, URL and alt text, plus density and readability.
- No invented "target terms". We check the phrase you set, and say why we do not guess at competitor terms.
- Outside-network checks on the same page: reachability, indexation, structured data.
- A daily watch that records when the page changes.
Which should you use?
Use Surfer when you are writing to rank for a competitive query and want competitor-term guidance. Use Shipwork for the free on-page sanity check and the technical checks Surfer does not make.
- On-page checkKeyword placements, density and readability, free.
- Content qualityThin and duplicate content.
- Keyword ideasReal search phrases from Google Autocomplete.
- Every check, explainedThe full list, each with what it inspects and the fix.
- Keyword cannibalization, fixedWhen two pages compete for one query.