Google is forever telling us that AI search is better quality… When they [users] get to a decision to click out, it’s a more highly qualified click… What we hope to see over time—and we don’t have any data to share on this—is more time spent on site, which is what we see organically in…
I don’t think this result will come as a surprise to anyone. Websites that get more traffic in traditional organic search also get mentioned more in AI Search. Popular sites are popular, even if the search system changes. I looked at the top 50 websites mentioned in Ahrefs Brand Radar for Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT,…
SEO is a playground for creative, scrappy problem-solvers. But today, it’s often reduced to a formula: plug keywords into an AI tool. Run a cookie-cutter checklist to create content. Build links. Hope traffic rolls in. That used to work. But with AI-powered search on the rise, the era of SEOs as technicians is fading, and the…
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…
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…
