Theo vs Soro for small business SEO (October 2026)

The scorecard

Tally: Theo 5, Soro 1, even 1, split 2. Every round tests one of three things: what gets done for the owner, what the owner keeps, or what it costs each month. The verdict rests on Round 2, what gets written and fixed after launch. Soro's prices, terms and publishing methods were read on trysoro.com, its WordPress plugin listing and its Shopify listing on October 20, 2026. Theo's come from the pricing page.

Round 1: What you are buying

Soro is an add-on for a website you already have. It writes SEO articles and publishes them into that site, and its setup starts from the site's address. None of Soro's pages describe building or hosting a website, so the site, its host and its bill stay with you.

Theo is the website. It builds the first preview from a description of the business or from your current site's address, usually within minutes, and then hosts the finished site. To change something, you type what should be different in a chat and Theo makes the edit. The first build costs nothing and comes before you pick a plan.

For an owner who already has a site, Theo rebuilds it from the current address. The old site stays live until the domain points at the new one. Theo includes no domain and no email.

Even so, Theo is the whole purchase: the site, its hosting and, on Starter and Pro, the search work, on one bill.

Round result: Theo.

Round 2: What gets written and fixed after launch

Soro writes blog articles, one a day, with images and with links inside each article. Its terms describe the service as one that "generates SEO-optimized articles and images". Where its pricing page covers technical SEO (the behind-the-scenes setup Google reads), it means its own articles: their titles, descriptions, links and images. Its pages do not describe writing service or landing pages, or fixing problems elsewhere on the site, such as slow pages, broken links or redirects.

On Starter and Pro, Theo does that work on the site it hosts. Every week it looks up the searches your competitors show up for and you do not, then drafts service pages and posts aimed at them, and it repairs technical problems as it goes. The same work covers landing pages, page speed and work toward being named in ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews. Each draft waits in the Growth tab, Theo's running list of pages and fixes. None of it uses chat credits. On every plan, connecting Google also submits your sitemap, the list of your pages that Google reads.

The round turns on the kind of work, not the count of articles. Soro posts more often. The service pages a customer lands on when searching for what you sell, and the repairs that keep the site readable to Google, are the part Soro's pages leave to you.

That gap is what the weekly work is for. In Theo's audit of 6,861 small business websites, 47 percent of the 4,633 sites with search data got an estimated zero visitors a month from Google search (The State of Small Business Websites 2026). A site with no one doing the search work gives Google nothing new to show. The report makes no claim about Soro's customers.

Picture a dental practice that takes no insurance and posts its prices. Soro may write a morning article on the search "dentist no insurance", but the page that sets out the practice's own prices for uninsured patients is a service page, the kind Soro's pages do not describe writing, so the practice writes that page or pays someone to. On Theo Starter, the Growth tab holds a post on deep cleaning against a regular cleaning one week and a page for uninsured patients the next. Each waits until the dentist has read it.

Neither page will bring in new patients in its first month. Search traffic takes months to build. The first month brings the site live on its domain, the first pages published and the sitemap sent to Google. Impressions, the times your pages appear in results, show up in Search Console (Google's free report on your site) before the clicks do.

Round result: Theo.

Round 2, continued: a page that work produces

Kestrelmoor Dental, a dental practice site built by Theo, carries a post written by the search work that runs on Starter and Pro: Deep Cleaning vs. Regular Cleaning: What Changes? It sits in the site's own journal at an address of its own, with its own title, it is listed in the sitemap, and its words are in the page as it arrives. Partway down, pictured below, a table sets the two visits side by side, from what each one treats to whether numbing is used, and a note beneath it warns that the comparison is no way to diagnose yourself. See the live site.

Round 3: Where the posts live

How Soro publishes depends on the site. On WordPress it posts through a plugin whose listing says it publishes "standard WordPress content". On Shopify it writes into the store's own blog. Either way, each article is a real post on your own domain, at an address of its own.

Soro lists other platforms too, without saying how articles reach them. It also has a script embed, a line of code pasted into a page that pulls the articles in from Soro, and it does not publish which sites get it. A Squarespace blog we checked that uses Soro's embed showed five things on October 20, 2026:

• Before any script ran, each article's address returned the same page as the blog's front page.
• None of the article text was in the HTML the server sends (the page as it arrives, before any script runs). A request posing as Google's crawler, the program Google reads pages with, got the same.
• In that HTML, the canonical tag, which tells Google which address is the main copy of a page, pointed every article at /blog.
• Not one article was in the sitemap, the file that lists a site's pages for search engines.
• The words arrived from Soro's servers by script, after the page had opened.

Round 3, continued: why the embed is the weak case

Google can run scripts, so it may still read those articles. Once the script ran, the page showed the article under its own title and added a second canonical tag pointing at the article's own address, so the page gave Google two different answers about which address is the main copy. Even so, an embed is the weakest way to publish: Google has to run Soro's script to see a word, and the text lives on Soro's servers, not in the site.

On Theo every post is a page of the site itself. It has its own address on your domain and its own title, the words are in the page Theo serves, and it is listed in the sitemap that Search Console reads.

Theo takes the round. Against the posts Soro makes straight into WordPress and Shopify it is even, and against the embed Theo's pages are the stronger way to publish.

Round result: Theo.

Round 4: How the posts fit the rest of the site

Soro links each article to other pages and to outside sources, and it lets you set a brand voice once. Its pages do not describe adding new articles to the menu, or adding links to them from the pages a site already has. In the embed, all the articles sit inside one blog page.

Theo writes each post into the site itself, linked to your service pages. A new page is written from the keyword research and linked from pages that already get visits, so it is not left for Google to stumble on. Existing service pages get clearer headings, a question section, calls to action and links of their own.

On the Kestrelmoor Dental site, one run of the work put a Journal link in the menu and the footer and linked the new post to the practice's first-visit, prices, insurance and membership pages. Another linked the membership page to the new page for uninsured patients.

Round result: Theo.

Round 5: Approval and control

Both products let you read before anything goes live. Soro creates a post each morning that you can approve, edit or let publish on its own, and its WordPress plugin can save articles as drafts. On Theo, each page, post and fix waits in the Growth tab until you publish it, unless you switch auto-publish on. Any other change is a message in the chat, and a weekly email lists what was added.

Round result: even.

Round 6: Sticker price

Soro's pricing page shows one plan, priced by how often you pay. It is $39 a month, $27 a month on quarterly billing, or $18 a month on yearly billing. Those prices come from a 50 percent discount code that Soro's checkout applies by itself, and Soro does not publish whether the discount carries into renewals. On Shopify it is $39 a month. Its terms say each subscription renews at the then-current price, with at least 30 days' notice of a price change. There is no free trial, only a 14-day money-back window for first-time subscribers, on the terms in the table below.

Theo bills monthly with no term. The first build is free, and Starter's first 30 days cost nothing. Each figure below is a monthly price, as of October 2026.

Round 6, continued: reading the two stickers

At its checkout prices, Soro costs less than Starter and Pro, the Theo plans that carry the search work, on every billing term. Paid month to month, its $39 is more than Basic's $29.99, which buys the site and hosting.

Round result: Soro.

Round 7: The site plus the work, per month

Soro's price comes on top of whatever the website already costs. The service pages and the repairs still need doing too, and with no Soro price they cost the owner's evenings or a hire. Whatever the two bills add up to, the only search work in that pair is Soro's blog articles.

On Theo Starter, one bill covers all of it: the site, its hosting and the weekly pages, posts and fixes, for $69.99 a month and free for the first 30 days. Pro, at $129.99 a month, drafts more pages and posts each week.

Round result: Theo.

Round 8: An existing store

Soro writes into a Shopify store's own blog, so its articles are added to the store you already run without the storefront having to change.

Theo does not work inside an existing Shopify theme. It builds the website shoppers find first (the home page, collection pages and product pages) and connects the store on every plan. Products, prices and stock show on the Theo pages with a cart, checkout completes in Shopify, and orders, payments and inventory stay there. A Wix store connects the same way. The store remains its own subscription: Shopify's Basic plan is $39 a month, billed month to month, as of October 2026. On Starter and Pro, the posts and landing pages Theo drafts live on that same site (how the Shopify connection works).

The round splits on the storefront. Soro adds to a storefront without changing it. Theo replaces it as the main website, with Shopify keeping the checkout, and in return the search work covers the whole site rather than the blog alone.

Round result: split.

Round 9: Ownership and leaving

Soro's terms assign the paying customer all the rights Soro has in what it writes. Soro publishes nothing about what happens to published articles once an owner cancels, though its site says articles can be exported. Posts it made straight into WordPress or Shopify are ordinary posts in your own site. Embedded articles are another matter: their text sits on Soro's servers, so the pages depend on Soro continuing to serve it.

On Theo, the pages, words and photos are yours, and you can cancel at any time with no term. The site stays live to the end of the paid period. Because Theo is the host, the site comes down after it, so save the text and images you want before then. On Pro, read-only GitHub access lets you browse and copy the site's code.

The round splits by how Soro published. Its WordPress and Shopify posts sit in a site you pay for elsewhere, so they would normally stay. Its embedded articles rest on Soro's servers, and there Theo is ahead: every Theo page holds its own words and photos, yours to save before the plan ends.

Round result: split.

How to move from Soro to Theo

Theo rebuilds from your live address, so the site itself needs no export. The guide to moving a website to Theo sets out the general steps.

1. Start with the free audit, which records the current site's estimated search traffic as a baseline. Then enter the same address in Theo for a preview that matches the look, and refine it in chat.
2. Check the articles. On WordPress, Theo rebuilds the posts and images from the live site. Articles in Soro's embed sit on Soro's servers, so save a copy from Soro first (its site says articles can be exported), then paste each one into the editing chat and ask Theo to add it as a post. If you took Soro's refund, its terms require those articles to come down, so leave them out.
3. Keep Soro and the current site running until the new site is live on your domain. Soro's cancellation takes effect at the end of the billing period.
4. Point the domain at Theo, both the root and the www version, with forwarding and parking off at the registrar. Only the website records change, so email keeps working where it is.
5. Once the domain is live, sign in with Google so Theo can set up Google Analytics and Search Console. That submits your sitemap on every plan. On Starter and Pro it also starts the weekly work, which redirects old addresses that still get search visits to their new pages.

The bottom line

Theo wins the tally, five rounds to one, with one even and two split. It also wins Round 2, the round that decides the verdict: what gets written and fixed after launch. Soro writes a blog article each day into a site the owner already runs, and its pages leave the service pages, the repairs and the site itself to that owner. Theo builds and hosts the site. On Starter and Pro it drafts posts and service pages every week as pages of that site, plus fixes, all held in the Growth tab for your approval. Soro takes the sticker-price round. For the work done, the plan is Starter or Pro; for the site and hosting alone, edited by chat, it is Basic. Prices and terms as of October 20, 2026.

Frequently asked questions