Why Draftly went from agency tool to self-serve blog writer

In December 2025 I made the biggest change Draftly has had. I cut it down from an agency tool that managed lots of client websites to a writer for one business and one website.

This post explains why, what changed, and how Draftly works today, ten months later.

The agency version made SEO harder

The first commercial version of Draftly was built for agencies. You could manage multiple clients, move posts across a Kanban board, and tune a brand voice for each account.

After a month of testing with a few inside users, I had to admit something uncomfortable. Draftly was overcomplicating SEO work instead of simplifying it.

Every extra client added settings. Every setting added a decision. People spent more time configuring Draftly than reading the posts it wrote. That’s backwards for a tool whose whole job is saving time.

What changed in December 2025

I made five changes at once:

One website per account. Draftly moved from a B2B, many-client setup to a single business managing its own blog.
Direct Google Analytics and Search Console connections, so you can see your site’s progress over time.
A newsroom view that shows the news topics that make the most sense for your business to write about.
A clearer history of posts, so it’s obvious what you’ve written and what’s been published.
A simpler content pipeline, so your next step is always clear.

The screenshots at the bottom of this post show what that looked like at the time.

Why one business, one website

A small business owner wants a good post on their blog this week, written the way they’d write it if they had the time.

Agencies have teams to manage the extra controls. A plumber, a dentist or a two-person software company doesn’t. Narrowing Draftly to one website let me spend every hour on the part that decides whether a post is worth publishing: the writing.

How Draftly works now

You paste your website URL. Draftly reads your site to learn what you sell and how you talk, picks a timely topic from your industry’s news, and writes a post in your brand voice.

Your first post is free, with no credit card. After that there are three paid plans: Solopreneur at $29 a month, Growth at $69 and Autopilot at $100. The full breakdown is on the pricing page.

A few things changed under the hood since December that matter more than the redesign did.

Every post gets checked against real writing rules

Draftly checks every draft in code before you see it: one H1, headings that make a point, the keyword in a few natural places, meta lengths, no invented numbers, and no stock AI phrasing. If a rule fails, Draftly runs one fix pass. The full list is on the SEO copywriting rules page.

The default model changed because of a test

GPT 6 Luna is now the default writer. In our October 8, 2026 test against those rules, it passed 19 of 20 test posts after its fix pass. GPT 5.4 Mini, the previous default, passed none. Paid plans can pick from 8 models, including Claude. You can see how 14 models compared in the AI writing benchmark.

Links point to pages that actually exist

Draftly now reads your sitemap, so internal links go to your real pages, starting with the ones you mark as priorities. Outside links come only from the sources behind the topic, and each one is checked to make sure it loads. Draftly never links to a competitor you’ve listed.

It publishes where your blog lives

Draftly publishes to WordPress, Shopify, Webflow, Ghost, Squarespace and HubSpot.

It works inside Claude and ChatGPT

Paid plans include the Draftly connector for Claude, ChatGPT and Cursor. It gives your assistant your brand voice, your posts and your topic ideas, plus ten read-only SEO tools for keyword and search data. It’s listed in the official MCP Registry as blog.draftly/seo. Setup takes about two minutes, and the steps are on the MCP page.

Google data is free on every plan

Connecting Google Search Console and Google Analytics costs nothing on any plan, including Free. Draftly only asks for read-only access, so it can show you how your posts perform and can’t change anything in your Google accounts.

What still needs work

Two parts of Draftly still need work, and you should know about both.

Topic picks are the weakest part for brand-new sites. When Draftly knows little about a business, the news it pulls can be a stretch. Right now I’m building a version that rejects topics that don’t fit your business and lets you choose from a few vetted options before anything gets written.

The SEO reporting inside Draftly is also basic today. A fuller dashboard with your top searches, top pages and how each Draftly post performs is in progress.

Both came straight from people using Draftly and telling me what bugged them. Keep that coming.

What I’d tell a small business owner today

Start with one post. Read it the way a customer would. If it sounds like you and answers a question your customers actually ask, keep going. If it doesn’t, tell me why, because that feedback is how most of the changes above happened.

Draftly is available in the United States only for now.

If you want to see how Draftly decides what makes a post good, the AI copywriter page walks through the whole process from URL to published post.

What’s the one thing that stops you from blogging more often? Email me at preston@draftly.blog. I read every one.

Preston