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MCP, which stands for Model Context Protocol, is an open standard that companies can use to integrate their external tools and data with compatible AI assistants. Imagine you’ve recently launched…

This checklist combines proven SEO essentials with the new steps that matter for AI search. No fluff, no fuss. It will help you strengthen your SEO foundation, adapt to changing…

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So I did something different: I asked the speakers and panelists at Ahrefs Evolve, our conference in San Diego from October 13-15, which newsletters they actually read and recommend. The…

Auditing your brand’s mentions is how you uncover: How the public sees your brand What misinformation might be feeding AI systems Which topics and entities are most strongly connected to…

But even if you’re our most loyal fan, there will still be plenty of insights that you’ve missed or have forgotten already. Many of these ideas are too good to…

They’ve always happened on social media, forums, news sites, and blogs. But now they’re happening in AI responses—and these mentions influence how millions of people discover and perceive your brand….

Pitching these outlets means your brand gets in front of readers, circulates on social media, ranks in search, and now resurfaces in AI. Below are the top 50 most-cited publisher…

In this guide, I’ll show you everything you need to know about using AI to create content, while still feeling confident about it. AI-generated content is any material—text, images, video,…

Thanks to generative AI, every part of our discipline is in flux: the tactics and strategies that yield great results, the tools and processes we use to achieve them, even…

User interactions, also called UX signals or user signals, include things like clicks, scrolls, swipes, and mouse hovers. These now play a major role in how Google ranks content and…

If your brand isn’t appearing in these AI responses, you’re becoming invisible to an increasingly important segment of your audience. LLM visibility is about making sure you’re mentioned and cited…

AI visibility is how discoverable your brand is and how often your content gets referenced across AI platforms like ChatGPT, Claude, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, and Perplexity. For…

And that’s where Ahrefs’ Brand Radar comes in. It’s one of the fastest-growing tools in AI brand visibility, with 100M+ prompts, 6+ AI indexes, and requires zero setup. Below, I…

Assistants like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity don’t show fixed results—they generate answers that vary with every run, every model, and every user. “AI rank tracking” is a misnomer—you can’t track…

These are the 100 most cited domains, along with their number of mentions. The top most cited domains in ChatGPT for the U.S. are Reddit, Wikipedia, Amazon, Forbes, and Business…

Want the full story? Read on. As you probably already know, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the practice of improving your website so it appears higher in Google, Bing, or…

These are the 100 most cited domains, along with their number of mentions. The top domains cited in AI Mode are Wikipedia, YouTube, Google’s blog, Reddit, and Google itself. With…

We know that AI assistants like ChatGPT access search indices, like Google and Bing, to retrieve URLs for their response. But how, exactly? To find out, we’ve run a series…

If you want any chance of visibility in LLM search, you need to understand how to make your brand visible in AI answers. The latest wave of experts claim to…

To find out, we looked at the http status of 16 million unique URLs cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity, Copilot, Gemini, Claude, and Mistral. We found that AI assistants send visitors…

If traffic from search goes up, so do their stock prices. But recently, many companies saw major traffic (and revenue) declines thanks to changes in AI search. This post is…

Two months later, on 20 May 2025, Google rolled out AI Mode to everyone in the U.S. Just a couple of months later, Google went full steam ahead and rolled…

SEO is still essential for brands to show up in these answers, but visibility now depends on more than rankings. What matters is whether your brand and content are trusted…

Across LinkedIn threads and AI‑SEO guides, the promise is the same: format your content into perfect “chunks” and you’ll get chosen for Google’s AI Overviews or cited in AI search…

However, over the past months, some SEOs discovered that ChatGPT may have secretly pivoted to using Google instead. These were all one-off experiments. So, I wondered if it was possible…

As AI tools become more common, they’re changing how people search, delivering direct, personalized answers, often without sending users to other websites. That means digital marketing is shifting—from chasing clicks…

And here’s the thing: they’re not just looking on Google anymore. People are turning to TikTok for product suggestions, digging through Reddit for brutally honest reviews, and asking ChatGPT for…

Ahrefs’ Community Manager, Michelle Lindner, shared Ryan Trahan’s “50 States Challenge” in our #Marketing Slack channel after watching it with her kids. She thought it showed some awesome examples of…

You’ve probably heard that Google’s AI search features are tanking organic traffic. In April, we reported that click-through rates dropped by 35% across 300,000 keywords. Now, a Pew Research study…

With the rapid growth of generative AI, businesses, educators, and publishers are asking a critical question: how can we tell what’s written by humans and what’s produced by machines? The…

Perplexity is the outlier: nearly 1 in 3 of its citations point to pages that rank in the top 10 for the target query. We analyzed four AI assistants—ChatGPT, Gemini,…

I’ll be honest: there are parts of my job that I don’t like. Writing my 500th article on content gap analysis because we found a new long-tail keyword to target….

So, to clear up the confusion, I’ll show you the key metrics that really matter, explain how to make sense of them, and show you how to do it all…

Here’s the thing: on one side, we’ve got how people feel about SEO these days—the doom-and-gloom headlines, the panic about zero-click searches, the fear that AI has made everything obsolete….

As we clamor to optimize for AI search visibility, I’ve seen suggestions that we should update pages more frequently to boost their chance of being cited. To test the theory,…

I asked our ace data scientist, Xibeijia, if she could help me build a profile of “AI proof keywords”. By “AI proof keywords” I mean queries that keep (or increase)…

Every SEO—whether beginner or expert—uses Google’s free tools in some capacity. They’re widely accessible, they offer a glimpse into how Google’s search and advertising systems work, and they’re often the…

AI Overviews appeared from nowhere in August 2024, and now appear on over a quarter of the keywords in this sample (and they’re much more prevalent for informational keywords). Functionally,…

We decided to find out. We pulled one million keywords that triggered AI Overviews and extracted the top three links cited within those AIOs: a total of 1.9 million citation…

AI models draw on search engine indexes to enrich their static training data in a process known as retrieval augmented generation (RAG), so some crossover between AI and search results…

For example, here’s an AI Overview in the 2nd position. I asked our awesome data scientist Xibeijia Guan to find out how often they show in different positions. She pulled…

Google believes AI Mode content is good enough to show to users in what will likely be the default search mode in the future. But the content itself doesn’t seem…

Even better if it’s on your company’s dime. Here are the marketing conferences we think are worth attending in 2025. Location: San Francisco, USA Prices: From US$1,399 Date: September 3-5…

Google uses “grounding” to improve their accuracy, but according to our research, AI Overviews are more likely to cite AI-generated content than human-written content. Here’s what we found: We took…

These are prominent pages on the web and those that other websites have deemed worthy of linking to. Having your brand present on these pages means you likely have more…

If you think about it, there is no clearer signal than the fact that Google has rapidly rolled out AI Overviews (and now AI mode), both of which are basically…

I looked at the top 50 websites mentioned in Ahrefs Brand Radar for Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and Perplexity. This is across ~76.7M AI Overviews, 957k ChatGPT prompts, and 953.5k…

Medicai used Ahrefs to accelerate their organic traffic against their competitors using a combination of programmatic and content-based strategies. About Medicai Medicai is a VC-backed healthcare startup that develops cloud-based…

These are prominent pages on the web, with a lot of visibility. Having your brand present on these pages means you likely have more credibility, that you’re a known brand….

There are tons of AI detectors available. And, while ours is the only one that can also show you any webpage’s backlinks and estimated search traffic, how the page content…

With AI, you can bypass coding, hiring a developer, or staring at a blank page for hours. You can automate everything from writing content to choosing a professional layout and…

The good news is that’s no longer true. Today, anyone with an internet connection can uncover really powerful market insights using affordable and even free tools. This guide will show…

Though still <1% of total traffic, it’s now our highest converting channel at 10%+ CVR (going by our new custom event tracking in Web Analytics). I wanted to see if…

I looked at the top 50 websites mentioned in Ahrefs Brand Radar for Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and Perplexity. This is across ~76.7M AI Overviews, 957k ChatGPT prompts, and 953.5k…

However, that changed when Google and OpenAI turned most of these queries into zero-click searches. For the remaining queries, search platforms directly reward authoritative and popular brands, so branding can…

If they hadn’t shown up when I was looking, I never would have known they existed. That got me thinking about how crucial search visibility really is for auto businesses….

It’s on track to drive change at a scale we haven’t seen since the industrial revolution. But in a space moving this fast, most stats you find are already out…

Unfortunately, we can’t even validate or dispute those claims, because Google doesn’t give us the ability to differentiate between AI-powered search traffic and traditional search traffic in Search Console or…

I looked at the top 50 websites mentioned in Ahrefs Brand Radar for Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and Perplexity. This is across ~76.7M AI Overviews, 957k ChatGPT prompts, and 953.5k…

To help you get it right, I turned to someone who’s been deep in the trenches of localization: Erik Sarissky, Head of International Marketing and Product Localization at Ahrefs. Erik…

Instead of just looking at which websites are mentioned the most, I wanted to understand whether those mentions actually match the popularity of the topics being discussed. I compared each…

It’s a search engine: To learn more about TikTok SEO, I hopped on a call with Charlotte Ang, the co-founder of Traffic Bees, a digital marketing agency based in Singapore…

In this article, we’re looking specifically at the costs and budgets associated with AI content. How much does AI content cost? Are companies investing more, or less? AI-generated content is…

The problem is that AI bots are new to web crawling. They’re still making some silly crawl decisions, bumping around, and wasting a lot of resources. We’ve already seen that…

This sits at odds with Google’s original search model, which worked by passing on referral traffic to third-party sites. Google is getting better at creating zero-click searches, and that means…

The roll-out of AI Overviews now creates two opportunities for top-ranking content to log impressions for a given keyword, while simultaneously reducing the number of people who click from the…

In this article, we’re looking at the performance of AI content. Does it rank? Does it perform better or worse than human content? Is it riskier than human content? Websites…

The terminology in this industry is evolving. I’m defining AI search as search that happens in AI assistants like ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, etc. While we’re working on a larger study…

But marketers have learned something important along the way: don’t try to measure everything. It’s more helpful to track a few key numbers that give you useful insights. This guide…

To answer this question, I decided to look at the referral traffic from AI Search using Ahrefs Web Analytics and compare that to traffic from Organic Search for ahrefs.com. We…

Staying ahead and making great decisions on what to do next means understanding the data. We’ve run dozens of data studies helping SEOs and marketers figure out what’s going on…

AI Assistants may also work slightly differently. By default, they don’t have any notion of websites and can make up sources. Looking at you ChatGPT. Some systems are augmented with…

In this article, we’re looking specifically at AI’s impact on content creation. How common is AI content use? What tools do people use? How often do people edit their outputs?…

I looked at the top 10 websites cited in Ahrefs Brand Radar for Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and Perplexity. This is across ~76.7M AI Overviews, 957k ChatGPT prompts, and 953.5k…

I was previously a skeptic of AI content detectors, and many people still are. Andrew Holland recently shared a LinkedIn comment that does a good job summarizing common concerns: In…

That used to work. But with AI-powered search on the rise, the era of SEOs as technicians is fading, and the era of SEOs as real marketers is here. Search…

This coincides with the massive rollout of AI Overviews we saw alongside the March update. AI Overviews are now in 200 countries and 40 + languages. It seems that when…

But our latest study might surprise you: Nearly half of all Google searches (45.7%) are branded searches—meaning people are actively seeking out specific companies and products they already know. Yep,…

I was looking at our LLM filter in Ahrefs Web Analytics and noticed some common generative engines missing from the list. They’re in our filters, but we aren’t seeing any…

It gives me a “second brain” and superhuman speed, and takes care of all the tedious tasks I dislike about my job. Sure, maybe one day AI will replace my…

Soon it won’t be a case of “Should I, or shouldn’t I optimize for AI Overviews?” If you want any chance of search visibility, you’ll need to understand how to…

Blocking these bots will mostly impact the link index of the tools. They won’t be able to crawl the pages, so they can’t check where those pages are linking. It…

Google just rolled out AI Mode to US users. I was testing if the clicks would show in Google Search Console, without any success. A post by Tom Critchlow on…

There’s a cost to bots crawling your websites and there’s a social contract between search engines and website owners, where search engines add value by sending referral traffic to websites….

That’s where we are with optimizing for visibility in LLMs (LLMO), and we need more experts to call out this behavior in our industry, like Lily Ray has done in…

At Ahrefs, our machine learning team has built an AI content detector (codenamed bot_or_not). We’re about to release the AI content detector for Ahrefs customers to use, so we decided…

In traditional Ahrefs fashion, I wanted to do the largest data study ever done on AIOs to see what we could learn and share with the marketing community. For a…

We’re moving from chasing traffic, to competing for brand visibility. We’re thinking about how AI crawlers view our site–not just search engine bots. We’re trying to follow the breadcrumb trail…

Clients and stakeholders often ask, “How long till my website (page) ranks on top of Google?” You could say “it depends” and give a lecture on all the variables like…

To help you with that, I looked at some of the best PPC tools and picked nine that stand out for their focus, features, and value, especially for teams looking…

Using Ahrefs’ website growth data, we’ve found the 40 fastest-growing cybersecurity companies of 2025 based on estimated year-over-year (YoY) organic traffic growth. We analyzed 4,300+ global cybersecurity companies and filtered…

From AI tutors to classroom management platforms, both new startups and established players are racing to capture attention and market share. Using Ahrefs’ website data, we’ve found the top 50…

This chimes with what we’re seeing in Ahrefs Brand Radar, our new marketing intelligence tool which lets you track your brand presence in AI search. We analyzed 25M AI overview…

New technologies, channels, strategies, and tactics are constantly emerging. It’s impossible for any team to pursue every idea. What do you do then? How do you vet each idea and…

When I asked experts for their #1 PPC tip for beginners (see my introduction to search ads), many said it’s smart to focus on keywords that are less popular, more…

For example, let’s say your brand gets 20,000 searches in a month, and your three main competitors get 15,000, 10,000, and 5,000 searches, respectively. The total branded search volume in…

It’s not a different type of SEO. You don’t need to do wildly different things. Rather, it’s a mental model that advances: The way you think about SEO strategy The…

Here are a few examples from a finished project I’ve already created using this method. The first example is an executive summary, providing a brief overview of the analysis. And…

You might even have seen it for yourself. You’re trying to make a simple pasta dish (like aglio e olio) but you have to scroll through a piece that’s thousands…