Given OpenAI’s close relationship with Microsoft, many expect that ChatGPT’s retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) process would use Bing. 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 for us to find out the ‘truth’ using data…
GEO, short for Generative Engine Optimization (also known as AEO or LLMO), is about getting your brand noticed—and accurately represented—in AI-generated answers. That includes results from Google’s AI Overviews, and AI assistants like ChatGPT, and Gemini. The goal is to make sure your brand shows up when AI tools answer user questions, even if no…
Search everywhere optimization (some call it SEvO) means making sure people can find you no matter where they’re looking online. 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 personalized shopping lists and recommendations—often…
It started with a $100,000 donation, ended with $11 million raised for charity, and somewhere along the way, an electric bike brand earned 235M+ impressions and $7M worth of brand awareness. 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…
First, we had “the great decoupling”, now we’re seeing “the great diversification”. Brands are overhauling their strategies since losing clicks to Google. 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 has revealed that…
In April 2025, we analyzed 900,000 newly created web pages and discovered that 74.2% contained AI-generated content. 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 answer: it’s possible, but not foolproof. Here’s how…
In a dataset of 15,000 prompts, we found that—on average—only 12% of links cited by ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot appear in Google’s top 10 results for the same prompt. 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…
Here’s the complete process I use to publish high-quality AI content on the Ahrefs blog. 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. Listing out the features of 30 free SEO tools for yet…
There are plenty of website metrics out there, and just as many tools to track them. 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 with one free, privacy-friendly tool that’s ready for the AI age….
Has AI and social media killed SEO in 2025? Not even close. 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. But on the other hand, the data tells a totally different story. The data…
Do AI assistants like ChatGPT and Perplexity prefer to cite “fresh” content? We analyzed 17 million citations across 7 AI search platforms to find out. 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, we used…
Google provides a solid set of free SEO tools. From simple keyword research to performance tracking, you can stitch together a full workflow without spending a dime. 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…
