i soft-launched my course last week. 154 people are currently working through it 😱 it's $99. it contains everything i know about thought leadership content: ~ ideation frameworks ~ writing techniques ~ distribution tactics ~ examples and teardowns ryanlaw.podia.com/how-to-wri…

Believe it or not, we [@Ahrefs] have DOUBLED our API/MCP limits on all plans! 🔥 AI is making it stupidly easy for marketers to build their own tools. The bottleneck isn't code anymore, it's quality data. @Ahrefs operates one of the largest marketing datasets in the world, and now all our users can pipe it directly into whatever they're building. Exciting times!

i've built tons of AI apps and workflows, most of them get thrown away or abandoned, BUT... i use this one simple little tool every day: it's called "competitor feed", and it's dead simple, basically an old-school RSS feed with a few AI features added in. but i love it! and it's literally the first thing i check every day. it shows me a live feed of all the latest content my competitors have published. i check it every morning, hotkey through the list to save/decline ideas, add my notes and ideas for future reference. and the cool AI stuff: - it autosuggests relevant competitors to follow (using Ahrefs MCP > organic competitors report) and automatically adds their sitemaps - it shows me the closest matching articles on my blog (using vector embeddings and cosine similarity) - it pulls relevant keyword data from the Ahrefs MCP on request - it analyses the past 30-days of content for each competitor and tries to summarise their content strategy (helpful for spotting trends/themes i might have missed) it takes a few minutes a day to stay completely on top of what our competitors are publishing, and i can get inspiration and assign new topics and keywords to the Linear board (where i manage our blog team) in a couple of seconds. the era of personal software is pretty cool, i recommend making something like this if you run content marketing/SEO for a brand :)

We're giving away 3 "Standard pass" tickets to @Ahrefs Evolve in San Diego (12-13 Oct)! To enter, just complete BOTH of the following steps: 1. Like this post. 2. Leave a comment & tell us where you're traveling from. ... / Entries close on Friday 18th Sept 10PM (Pacific time). / Winners will be announced by Tuesday 22th Sept. ... Visit our website for more details - ahrefsevolve(dot)com ... NOTE: the prize is "Standard pass" ticket only, which doesn't include travel or accomodation.

10,000,000+/day 😮 → It's crazy how much you folks use @ahrefs ' free Domain Rating API. And we couldn't be happier about it. 🤗 DR has been the industry standard for assessing a website's link authority for years. But now, with free API access, it's quickly becoming ubiquitous. Oh, and a fun behind-the-scenes detail: Usage actually peaked at over 50M+/day back in July, shortly after we announced it. That's when we realized that making the API usage anonymous was a mistake. 😅 Once we required everyone to register a (free) account to use it, the numbers calmed down a bit.

carne asada fries on the seafront. neon and palm trees. internet friends becoming IRL friends. plotting SEO shenanigans over West Coast IPAs. @Kevin_Indig DJing. the very big screen and even bigger ideas. more carne asada fries. i miss @ahrefsevolve San Diego with a vengeance. but it's okay, because it's almost here again 🥰 October 12-13, the best SEO, AEO & AI marketing conference around returns to glorious San Diego. that means @randfish, @MarketingProfs, @TheCoolestCool, @aleyda, another dozen+ legendary speakers... ...and yes. more carne asada fries! you should come too: ahrefsevolve.com/

Pretty wild I just threw this together in 3 minutes for a project I'm working on with @ahrefs @letaidocom

New research: Just three sites account for 76% of Google's 'Discussions and forums' links worldwide. Reddit appeared in 83.9% of results, which is surprisingly the lowest share we've seen in two years. That said, it's already growing again in August. Even though it's so prevalent across English-language results, I don't see this SERP feature discussed too often. I wanted to change that, so spent some time diving into the data. Do new forums rank well? What about new subreddits? How much do backlinks help individual threads? I tried to answer all of the questions and more. Link in the first reply, or check out the last post on the Ahrefs blog. I hope you find it valuable! 🙌

THIS THURSDAY! join me and three content marketing legends for a roundtable discussion about AI content marketing :) we'll get nitty-gritty and ultra-nerdy with questions like: - what tools and workflows do you use for AI content? - how do you avoid creating AI slop? - how do you feel about the risks of publishing AI content? - where does generative AI still totally suck? featuring @KirstiLang from @buffer, Emma Young from @Hostinger, and @timmetz from @animalzco! (and the awesome Kamila from @ahrefs moderating) register now for freeeeee: ahrefs.zoom.us/webinar/regis…

Some real truth here in that SEO was almost too easy and the economics were too good for too long - and leaders got "addicted" to this fast traffic with great "per click" economics vs paid - so now when people sour on SEO maybe what they are really upset about is how little attention they could pay to it, and reasonably rely on this traffic for such a low relative investment? ahrefs.com/blog/seo-is-still…

me, using Wispr Flow all day

if you're a writer worried that AI is sucking the soul out of your content creation... have hope 🕊️ my awesome colleague @m_makosiewicz published ten weird and wonderful workflows that pair old-fashioned human grey matter with novel uses of AI, including: - the "Living Draft" method (perpetual stew anyone?) - getting AI to interview YOU about a topic - generating literally 100 angles for your article - using mental models to constrain content creation and many more! AI content doesn't have to be all pipelines and automation, it can be weird and wonderful too :) check it out: ahrefs.com/blog/creative-way…

we are re-running our big "AI in content marketing" survey, and i would love your perspective! from AI skeptic to AI-native, all opinions and experiences welcome and gratefully received. and if you fill out the form, there's an option to get the final report emailed directly to you at the end :) docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F…

"AI content can never be good because it's statistically average." i see this sentiment a lot and it is completely misguided. it presupposes that everything an AI makes is constrained to its base knowledge, which has not been true for years. even in your most basic conversations with ChatGPT or any other AI search engine, AI will use retrieval‑augmented generation to retrieve relevant content from all over the internet. it can collect original research, data, statistics, and first‑person opinions and perspectives, all of which can inform your AI content generation. in fact, you can very easily and cheaply use AI to conduct deeper, more thorough research than a human counterpart could in the limited time we have available for each article. when writing content in the past, i would read maybe five blog posts in depth and scan several more. but AI can make HUNDREDS of calls in the same time frame and be much, much more thorough in its research. as soon as you introspect into the discrete processes you, as a human, actually conduct to create something "well researched", you realize they are all tasks that AI can perform, and do so very thoroughly at a scale humans cannot match. you can build trusted source lists that the AI prioritizes during retrieval. you can have the AI listen for new research and cite it the moment it becomes available, faster than any human could feasibly do. you can have the AI email you a bunch of questions and interview you on a topic, incorporating your first‑person experiences into the content. you can even have AI collect the email addresses of subject‑matter experts to ask them questions automatically! there is no excuse for publishing base model slop in AI content generation. virtually everything that made human content well‑researched, interesting, and original can be done using AI, often faster and more efficiently. this is not to say that AI-generated content is good by default; it isn’t. it is still possible to publish base-model slop if you approach it with little care or attention, but it is also entirely possible to create something incredible, even better than average, with the help of AI.

Many companies are unwilling to publish AI content for fear Google will punish them. But does Google really punish websites just for using AI content? Or is AI only problematic when it's used to create spammy, scaled content? We set out to answer four questions that might shed some light on the issue: - Are there any fully AI-generated pages in top-ranking positions? - How common is AI-generated content throughout the top 10? - Does Google index content with a very high likelihood of being AI? - Does the organic performance of AI-generated content tank within a few months? Some findings: - Fully AI-written pages can and do rank in top positions: 5.3% of top-ranking (positions 1–3) pages are 100% AI-generated, and 9% are ≥80% AI content. - Every position in the top 10 contains a meaningful share of heavily AI-generated pages: between 8.4% (position 1) and 11.7% (position 10) of pages have ≥80% AI content. - Indexation rate drops from 49.28% for low-AI-content pages to 40.35% for very-high-AI-content pages: lower, but lots of AI content still makes it into the index. - Low and moderate AI-content pages received 2–3x the organic impressions of high or very-high AI-content pages, but those impressions were stable over the period we studied. Tl;dr: I believe that Google is really not against AI content; it is against BAD content, but confusion arises because AI content and bad content overlap a significant amount of the time. Full study out now: ahrefs.com/blog/google-doesn…

great news: i just launched a free llms.txt file generator✨ enter your website and get the perfect llms.txt file, based on detailed analysis of 137,000 domains. send this to your boss, colleagues, clients, GEO agency, or anyone who says you need an LLMs.txt file. live now: ahrefs.com/blog/free-llms-tx…

we launched our /writing-tools/ subfolder in mid-2023. within a year, it was pulling close to a million US organic visits a month. even now that AI answers are devastating click-through rates, our writing tools still hold steady in the hundreds of thousands of visits, month after month, with little ongoing work. our free SEO tools (keyword generator, backlink checker, traffic checker, etc) tell the same story. they are consistently among our highest-traffic pages. a lot of searchers don't want to *read*. they want to *do*. they type "backlink checker" because they want to see their backlinks, right now, not read 3,500 words about them. and a tool is much harder for Google to summarise out of existence. AI Overviews can describe how a tool works, but (for now at least 😅) they won't build it for you. the catch used to be that building tools required developers. it doesn't anymore—you can spin one up in an afternoon with a few thousand tokens and a little know-how. the BIGGER bottleneck is knowing *which* tool to build. so i wrote a full guide on exactly that: how to find tool keywords worth going after, how to filter out the ones big brands already own, and how to build the thing once you've found the opportunity. here's the guide: ahrefs.com/blog/the-free-too…