When most marketers think about SEO, they jump straight to keywords like “best running shoes” or “how to do [whatever]”. Non-branded, high-intent, top-of-funnel stuff. 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, nearly…
Search is moving from traditional search engines to generative engines, but traffic from many of these sites isn’t being tracked properly in analytics. It’s their fault, not yours. 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…
According to our upcoming study, 87% of marketers use AI for content. I’m one of them. AI helped me build a career around writing. It’s part of nearly everything I do. Honestly, I can’t even remember how I worked without it—and I don’t want to. It gives me a “second brain” and superhuman speed, and takes care…
With Google’s AI mode developments, we’re heading toward a future where search results could eventually roll up into one big AI Overview. 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 rank in Google’s…
Ever wonder which SEO bots are the most blocked? This can impact the quality of the data the tools provide. 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 doesn’t matter for traffic estimates,…
Google just rolled out AI Mode to US users. I was testing if the clicks would show in Google Search Console, but they aren’t showing up. A post by Tom Critchlow on LinkedIn made me wonder how a click on a link in AI Mode would be recorded in analytics. The tl;dr is that clicks…
Built within these scores is an implicit assumption that the higher your score, the higher you’ll likely rank on Google. But is that actually true? To find out, I studied the correlation between rankings and content scores from five content optimization tools: Surfer, Frase, NeuronWriter, Clearscope, and our own AI Content Helper. We found weak…
AI bots power some of the most advanced technologies we use today, from search engines to AI assistants. However, their increasing presence has led to a growing number of websites blocking them. 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…
We’ve seen this before. A new technology rises. Visibility becomes a new currency. And people—ahem, SEOs—rush to game the system. 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 this post: If you’re tricking, sculpting,…
We analyzed 900,000 newly created web pages in April 2025 and found that 74.2% of them contained AI-generated content. 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 to put it through its paces…
According to Google, AI Overviews (AIOs) had over 1.5 billion users a month in Q1 2025. That would be 18.3% of all the people on the planet or 26.6% of all internet users. That’s a massive reach. In traditional Ahrefs fashion, I wanted to do the largest data study ever done on AIOs to see…
AI is reshaping search optimization—it’s no longer just about ranking in search results, but about earning visibility in AI-generated answers. 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 through an entirely new kind…
