Last December, a Koala AI customer put the whole problem in one line on Trustpilot: "I had credit there but because I didn't spend it, all credits are gone." Koala's reply explained that monthly-plan credits expire after a month and annual-plan credits after a year. The pricing page says the same thing in plain words.
That makes the credit clock the first thing I'd plan around. Below is how I'd move from Koala AI, the AI article writer at koala.sh, to RankControl, and what I'd check on your own site before leaving. Every Koala detail comes from its site, pricing page, help center and changelog as of September 26, 2026. One naming note: this is a different company from the Koala browser agent at getkoala.com.
What comes with you when you switch from Koala AI
Since Koala publishes straight into your CMS, most of your finished work already lives on your site. What needs attention is the drafts and the Brand DNA knowledge base, plus the snippets two Koala tools add to your pages.
| In Koala AI | Can you take it? | Where it lands in RankControl |
|---|---|---|
| Articles published to WordPress, Shopify, Webflow or Ghost | Already native posts on your site | Link targets, found by a sitemap scan |
| Unpublished drafts | Copy out; no export tool documented | Reference while you plan titles |
| Brand DNA knowledge base and tone of voice | Copy out by hand | Brand Control |
| KoalaLinks internal links, schema and related posts | Check how they're added before removing | Internal links from the content engine |
| KoalaMagnets lead captures | Export the CSV | Your own CRM |
| Unused words and credits | Expire on the plan's clock | Nothing to carry |
Time it around your credits
Koala meters words and platform credits as two separate allowances, and each one runs on its own clock. Here's how its terms line up against an exit:
| Koala's terms | What they say | What I'd do |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly-plan credits | Expire after a month | Spend them before the renewal date |
| Annual-plan credits | Expire a year after they're granted | The same, with more at stake |
| Unused words | Nothing in the pricing suggests they carry over after you leave | Use them before you cancel |
| Refunds | Within 15 days of a new plan, if you've used "under 15,000 words and 100 credits" | Don't plan on one after that |
| Early lifetime deals | Holders now get 30% off any plan | Check how cancelling a newer plan affects yours |
Put together, the cheapest moment to cancel is just before your renewal date, once you've used what you paid for. On an annual plan that date carries more weight, because a whole year is riding on it. Koala sticks to its refund rule, too. In a June exchange on Trustpilot, it turned down a refund six months into an annual plan and pointed back to the policy.
Save your work before you cancel
Koala's help center doesn't describe an export tool, so everything leaves by hand while the plan is still active. This is what I'd save, and how:
| What to save | How |
|---|---|
| Unpublished drafts | Copy them out of the editor |
| Brand DNA: services, credentials, product details and tone-of-voice settings | Copy by hand |
| KoalaWriter presets and custom instructions | Copy by hand |
| KoalaMagnets leads | Export as CSV, since each lead magnet on your site stops working after you leave |
| Invoices | Download them from the billing page |
The API can pull articles as well, if someone on your team already uses it, though for most teams copying drafts from the editor beats writing a script. Whichever route you take, keep each draft's target keyword and planned publish date with it, so you can decide later which ones still deserve a slot on your calendar.
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Check what Koala added to your site
This step is the easiest to miss. KoalaLinks and KoalaMagnets both run through a snippet you added to your site. KoalaLinks uses it to place internal links, schema markup and a related-posts widget, while KoalaMagnets uses it to embed lead-capture tools.
So before you delete anything, work out what the snippet is holding up. Open a few posts and look at where the internal links and schema live. If they sit in the post content, they stay. If they only appear when the snippet runs, they vanish once it's removed, and your most important pages will need replacements.
Only then would I disconnect Koala:
| Where Koala is connected | What to remove |
|---|---|
| WordPress | The Koala plugin: deactivate it, then delete it |
| Shopify, Webflow or Ghost | Koala's access |
| Webhooks | Turn them off |
| Search Console and Google Analytics, if you connected them to Brand DNA | Koala's access |
| Claude or ChatGPT, if you added the Koala MCP server | The MCP server |
Take stock of the articles Koala wrote
Cancelling doesn't touch the articles Koala already published, which makes this a good moment to see which ones pull their weight. Export clicks and impressions from Search Console for every URL Koala published in the last three months, sort by impressions, and mark the top 20.
Those 20 deserve a closer read. An Ahrefs study from July looked at pages in Google's top 10 and found that fully AI-written pages can rank, yet pages that were less than half AI-written held 82.2% of the top three spots. I'd give each of your 20 a human edit with real examples, first-hand detail and numbers that are current.
The last check is one Koala never did for you. Log out, ask ChatGPT and Perplexity your 10 most important buyer questions, and note whether any Koala article gets cited. That's the only before-picture you'll have.
Cancel
Koala's help center routes cancelling through your Account page: scroll down to the Customer Portal section and click Cancel Plan. Billing goes through Stripe and appears on your statement as "koala.sh". Screenshot the confirmation before you close the tab.
Where everything lands in RankControl
Brand Control is where I'd start. It reads your live site and drafts your voice, products, buyers and competitors for you to correct. Your Brand DNA notes and tone-of-voice rules go in as guideline rules, and up to three of your best articles can go in as style references.
Then connect a publishing destination. RankControl publishes natively to nine, and the WordPress, Shopify, Webflow and Ghost sites Koala worked with are all among them. Run the sitemap scan so new articles link into the ones Koala published.
From there, the content engine plans titles from your buyers' questions, writes each article against the pages already ranking, and adds internal links as it goes. It covers 26 content formats. Koala's blog posts, listicles and how-to guides all have direct equivalents there, alongside comparisons, FAQs and case studies. Nothing auto-publishes until you switch that on.
As a pure writing toolkit, Koala goes further. It has a chat assistant and an image generator, bulk writing for 100+ articles at once, and Amazon affiliate roundups built on live product data, none of which RankControl offers.
The bigger difference shows up after publishing. You can add up to 50 tracked queries, and AI visibility tracking checks each one weekly on ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, Grok and Google AI Mode. Koala optimizes articles for AI answers while writing them, but its only citation checks are on-demand Google AI Overview lookups through its MCP beta. RankControl tells you every week whether the engines cite you.
For links, Link Control finds prospects for each published article and drafts outreach from your own mailbox. If you'd rather hand links off, Managed Backlinks adds five a month from DR 25+ sites for $350.
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The switch from Koala AI, step by step
In order, with rough times:
| What to do | Time |
|---|---|
| Note your renewal date and use remaining words and credits first | First |
| Copy drafts, Brand DNA, presets and instructions | 45 to 90 minutes |
| Export KoalaMagnets leads and download invoices | About 15 minutes |
| Check which links and schema depend on the KoalaLinks snippet | About 30 minutes |
| Start RankControl's 7-day free trial and let setup read your site | About 15 minutes |
| Correct the brand draft, add guideline rules and style references | 30 to 45 minutes |
| Add tracked queries and competitors, then connect your CMS | About 45 minutes |
| Disconnect Koala's plugin, apps and Google access, then cancel | Just before renewal |
It adds up to four to five hours, which I'd spread around your renewal date.
What changes after the switch
Billing is the obvious change. Koala meters words and credits across nine plans. At the bottom, $25 a month buys 45,000 words. The top plan is $2,000 for 10 million, and the most capable writing models burn through words two or three times faster, so a plan can cover less writing than its word count suggests.
RankControl is one plan at $400 a month. It includes 100 pages and 50 tracked queries on six engines, with five seats, and there's no credit balance to use up before you leave.
The bigger shift is in what you measure. With Koala, a published article is the finish line. In RankControl it's the middle of the loop, followed by weekly checks on whether AI engines cite it and a weekly email with new citations, ranking moves and visits from AI answers.
You can run all of that by hand, writing the pages, publishing them, pitching the links and checking six engines every week. Or RankControl's agents can run it every month while you focus on your product. For the two tools head to head, see RankControl vs Koala AI.
If you want a baseline first, run a free check of your brand in AI answers.
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