Ranking of AI models has a surprise

The best AI tool for writing isn’t the one you’re using. It isn’t Claude, it isn’t ChatGPT.

According to the latest Hemingway-bench ranking from Surge AI, it’s Gemini. In fact, Gemini models took the top three spots on the leaderboard.

Survey says!

1. Gemini 3.1 (Pro)
2. Gemini 3 (Flash)
3. Gemini 3 (Pro)
4. Claude Opus 4.7 (Max)
5. GPT-5.5

This will come as a surprise to a lot of people. 80% of content creators and marketers use ChatGPT as their primary tool and 55% use Claude. Gemini is a distant third.

OK, yeah, but what’s Hemingway-bench anyway? Actually, it’s a who: a group of people paid by Surge AI to read and judge writing by models. It’s not a “vibe check” like Arena AI, it’s not an autograder like EQ-Bench Creative Writing.

It’s a “blind taste test” of models by human experts, including professional screenwriters, poets, speechwriters and copyeditors, who spend hours evaluating quality, creativity and nuance.

Of Gemini, they said, it “felt like a master wordsmith,” “had actual literary flair” and “used strong prose and vocabulary without sounding pretentious.”

The takeaway is, you don’t have to spend weeks building a custom agent and feeding it content if you want to get a decent draft out of an AI tool.

But, once you have that draft, don’t stop there. Whatever tool you used, your draft is still going to lack the information gain, the personal experience, the rare insight that make the content you post appealing to algorithms.

To get all this, hand off your draft to a dedicated editorial partner. That’s the vital last step, where the tone is sharpened to a clear human voice, the data is structured and your individual perspective is instilled throughout.

So, your new workflow: do your draft with AI, then pass it to a partner to turn it into a standout asset.