AI Marketing Tools, Tested

Tool reviews are the least trustworthy genre in marketing content, because most of them are paid for - affiliate links, sponsorships, or a vendor’s own blog wearing a review costume. I write mine the other way: I run the tool on real work, publish what happened including the failures, and link nothing for a commission.

The bar for appearing here is simple. If I couldn’t test it, I don’t review it. A review that summarises a pricing page is a press release with extra steps.

The reviews

Marketing OS: I let a Claude skill audit my site - an open-source “marketing department in one skill” with 14 modules and a scoring rubric. I ran its audit against this site, kept the score it gave me, and checked every finding by hand. What held up, what were false positives, and what that says about agent skills generally.

The free stack

Not a review but a survey with the same sourcing discipline: Free AI marketing tools that actually deliver checks a dozen free tiers against the vendors’ own pricing pages and names the catch in each one - the demo caps, the gated AI features, the data trades. It is where I’d start a zero-budget stack.

More are coming as the category matures - automation platforms, AI visibility trackers, and the growing pile of agent skills that claim a whole job. For where tools fit in the practice as a whole, start with the complete guide to AI marketing.