Branding wasn’t something SEOs traditionally thought much about. The real wins were in non-branded keywords, where the traffic and conversions lived. 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 no longer be ignored…
I became interested in automotive SEO after buying a new car and getting some repairs done on my old one at the same time. I found the dealerships and repair shops that helped me out, as well as the car that I bought, through Google. If they hadn’t shown up when I was looking, I…
AI is all anyone can talk about right now–and for good reason. 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 But in a space moving this fast, most stats you find are already out of date. So we did the digging for you. Here are 80+ current, credible,…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
Share of search (SoS) is the percentage of all brand-name searches in your market that mention your brand. To find it, count how many times people searched for your brand name, add up the searches for every competing brand, then divide your number by that total and multiply by 100. For example, let’s say your brand…
Semantic SEO sounds complicated, but it simply boils down to doing SEO without cutting corners. If you do SEO properly, you’re automatically doing semantic SEO. It’s just that most people aren’t doing it properly… It’s not a different type of SEO. You don’t need to do wildly different things. Rather, it’s a mental model that…
Developers and marketers are being told to add llms.txt files to their sites to help large language models (LLMs) “understand” their content. But what exactly is llms.txt, who’s using it, and—more importantly—should you care? llmstext.org. In a nutshell, it’s a text file designed to tell LLMs where to find the good stuff: API documentation, return policies,…
2025 is all about brand building. At Ahrefs, we’ve already been doing that for over a decade, but there’s never been a better time for us to ramp things up. After writing an article on 11 ways to measure brand awareness, I figured now’s also the perfect time for us to get a clearer picture…
You have a target keyword. You want to have your website appear in the search results for that keyword. How do you do that? How do you actually rank for a keyword? Follow this guide to find out how. keyword research guide ranks for 2,100 keywords: Most of them are simply variations of the main topic…
