AI article generation is the use of a language model to write a draft article for you. You give the tool a topic, usually a target keyword, and ideally an outline and some facts. It returns headings and paragraphs in a minute or two. Most current tools also handle the jobs around the draft, such as keyword ideas, outlines built from pages that already rank, images and publishing to your site.
How it works
The tools run on large language models, trained on huge amounts of text to predict which words are likely to come next. When you ask for an article on choosing a CRM, the model writes the sequence of sentences that most often follows a request like yours. Google's own guidance for site owners puts it plainly: generative models "don't retrieve facts, but predict a likely sequence of words based on their training data", which is why their output can contain errors, often called hallucinations.
That is a different approach from the automated writing that came before it. In July 2014 the Associated Press started publishing automated stories about US company earnings, built with Automated Insights from structured data supplied by Zacks Investment Research. Within a year AP said it was producing more than 3,000 of these stories each quarter, ten times what its reporters and editors had written before. Those systems filled templates from a spreadsheet of figures, so they were accurate within a narrow format and could write nothing else. Today's models can write about almost any topic, and the trade is that nothing ties a sentence to a checked source unless you provide one.
What a typical tool does
A modern article generator works in stages, and you can step in at each one:
- Research: suggests topics and keywords, sometimes with search volume.
- Outline: builds headings, often from the pages that already rank for your keyword.
- Draft: writes the article section by section in the tone you set.
- Extras: adds images, meta descriptions and internal links.
- Publishing: sends the draft to WordPress, Shopify or another platform.
Wordze, for example, includes topic and keyword research, outlines based on top-ranking competitor pages, a brand voice setting for tone, style and point of view, a Copyscape check for duplicate text, and publishing to WordPress and Shopify. Koala AI adds real-time factual data and live Amazon product data for affiliate articles on its paid plans, plus a bulk mode for writing many articles at once. Jasper is aimed more at marketing teams that write across channels and want shared brand voices.
What it costs
Prices vary with how much you write. These are the vendors' own figures, checked on November 4, 2026:
- Wordze Solo is $15 a month, or $10 a month billed yearly, for 250,000 credits, which Wordze says covers about 300 articles of around 1,500 words. There is no free trial; Wordze offers a 30-day money-back guarantee instead.
- Koala AI gives new accounts a one-time 5,000 words free. Its Starter plan is $25 a month for 45,000 words.
- Article Forge Standard is $57 a month, or $27 a month billed yearly, for 100,000 words, with a five-day free trial.
- Jasper Pro is $69 a seat a month, or $59 billed yearly, with a seven-day free trial.
For a small site publishing a few articles a week, the cost of the tool is rarely the issue. The real cost is the editing time each draft needs before it is worth publishing.
What it does well
An AI tool is fast at the parts of writing that follow a pattern. It can turn a clear brief into a structured first draft, give you ten title options, rewrite a paragraph shorter, or keep the same layout across a hundred product or category pages. For a site owner who knows the subject but struggles with a blank page, that first draft saves the slowest hour of the job.
It also helps with work in other languages. Wordze lists 42 writing languages on its pricing page, for example, which makes a first draft for a new market much cheaper than commissioning one from scratch.
Where it goes wrong
The main risk is confident errors. A model will write a price, a date or a statistic that sounds right and is not, and it will not flag the guess. Prices and product details change often, so a draft about software is especially likely to contain stale or invented figures.
The second problem is sameness. If you and your competitors give similar prompts for the same keyword, you get similar articles, built from the same pages that already rank. Nothing in the draft comes from your own testing, customers or numbers unless you add it.
The third is ownership. The US Copyright Office concluded in January 2025 that AI output can be protected only where a human author has determined enough of the expressive elements, and that prompts alone do not qualify. If you want to own your articles, your editing and additions matter in a legal sense as well as for quality.
What Google says about AI articles
Google published its position on February 8, 2023: "Appropriate use of AI or automation is not against our guidelines." Its ranking systems aim to reward helpful, original content however it is produced, judged on experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness.
The line Google draws is about purpose and scale. Its spam policies define scaled content abuse as generating many pages "for the primary purpose of manipulating search rankings and not helping users", and they name using generative AI tools to make many pages without adding value as an example. A site that publishes hundreds of lightly edited AI drafts on keywords it has no knowledge of is the target. A site that uses AI to draft and then adds checked facts and firsthand detail is not.
Should you use it?
AI article generation suits you if you already know your subject, can check every fact yourself, and want to spend your time on editing and adding detail instead of typing first drafts. It suits you less if you hoped to publish without reading the output, or if your readers come to you for firsthand testing that a model cannot provide.
To get started, try a tool with a free allowance or trial on two or three articles you would otherwise write yourself, and time the editing. Our guide to the best AI article generation software compares the main tools, and how to use AI for article generation walks through a workflow from brief to published page.
