I have some big personal news: Detailed has been acquired by Ahrefs. 🎉

I'm also super excited to be joining the company to work on marketing and product.

A few months ago Tim Soulo invited me to speak at their upcoming conference in San Diego, Ahrefs Evolve.

I brought up an Ahrefs podcast last year, and 24 hours later we were on a call about me potentially joining the company.

If you follow me you'll know I'm obsessed with all things strategy and research in this space - and more importantly, doing the work - so to get to do that on a much bigger scale is genuinely a dream of mine.

The Detailed SEO Extension and all current features will remain free.

In five years it has grown to 450,000+ weekly users, which I'm incredibly grateful for. We'll add new features at some point, while keeping in place what's already there.

Detailed will remain a separate brand and I'll continue to personally update relevant projects there.

My focus now is on product and tool ideas, research reports, marketing insights and everything actionable we can share to help grow your business.

Finally, a HUGE thanks to everyone who has read and shared my work over the years for this to even be a possibility. 🙏

I'm really excited for what's next.

Our data on traffic to ~115K sites, ChatGPT-vs-Google, has a new home on Ahrefs 🤩

As we've expanded the reports to include bot analytics and AI citations, moving them to the Ahrefs domain made the most sense.

We're calling the new hub 'Ahrefs Benchmarks', in line with our ar research reports on all things AI search.

Inside, you'll find:

- How much traffic Google is sending compared to Bing and other search engines

- The scale (and trend) of ChatGPT referrals

- The most active AI bots, broken down by industry

And much more.

There's still some polishing to do and notes to add, but if there are any other reports you would like to see (social platform referrals, broken down?), please let me know.

I'm happy to pass along the best ideas.

Check out /benchmarks or get the link in the first reply

Thanks!

Here's the link: ahrefs.com/benchmarks

Very open to suggestions on what else you would like to see there 🙏

I've just published a new report on The State of AI ✨ in Content Marketing.
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Some highlights:
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- 69% of marketers say they're publishing more AI content now than a year ago 📈
- Most respondents say human-written content beats AI, but 25.4% said AI is better (and that number verage blog post costs $286, compared with ~$61 for a post created with AI 💰
- One of the fastest-growing, specialist use cases of AI is for keyword clustering 🔑
- 61% of marketers say their view of AI-generated content has become more positive 🤝
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A huge thank you to our 301 survey respondents who helped us put this together, plus 8 more highlights in the full report.

They let me back on the Ahrefs blog to share this (it’s the first post there) or you can find the link in first reply.

Full credit to @thinking_slow who pioneered the original version of this report last year, which has been amazing to compare against.

Any likes on this are much appreciated, but of course, no pressure from me.

Cheers!

Thanks again to everyone who took part.

Here's the link: ahrefs.com/blog/marketers…

New research: I analyzed 70K+ AI responses over 4 weeks to see how often the same brands are named for the same prompts.
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This is my second time analyzing AI volatility, where I was originally inspired by @randfish's call for more data on the topic.

Some highlights:
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- The rely moves, but the tail turns over daily
- The usual leading brand is named first about half of the time, but when it isn't, it's often missing entirely
- While cited URLs change frequently, the mix of page types remains fairly stable
- Finding exact brand or citation list matches was rarer than you might expect, but it's a deliberately strict test
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This isn't the biggest study out there, but I also think its size is closer to what a typical brand would track for themselves, which was the main idea.

The link is on the Detailed homepage, or you can also find it in the replies below.
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Cheers! 🙌

This ended up being far more challenging than I expected, but I'm pretty happy with the end result.

Hopefully it's interesting 🤝

detailed.com/ai-volatility/

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, an pipe it directly into whatever they're building.

Exciting times!

I track 100+ digital-first* public companies to follow their comments on SEO & AI search. Now, I'm sharing them all in one place.

I've published variations of this in the past, looking at either revenue or commentary, but never both.

Thanks to a new page on Detailed (/revenue), you ic companies I like to follow in one place.

If they've said something about SEO or AI search in the past quarter, I've included that as well.

I'm most interested in what content sites (e.g. NerdWallet) and software companies (e.g. Monday) have to say, but it covers lots of different business models.

And of course, feel free to point your AI assistant of choice at the page and ask it to follow those most relevant to the space you operate in.

I purposefully don't include some companies like Google & Meta, just because they're not as "relatable" to me, but I'm open to any feedback there.

*Some companies technically aren't digital-first as they have dealerships and so on, but the overall theme is that these companies place a good amount of value on website traffic.

I still have a few improvements in mind (more links & previous quarter quotes), but I really hope you find it useful.

Link in the first reply 🙌

You can find the page here: detailed.com/revenue

Very open to any feedback and suggestions, and hopefully there aren't any bugs.

The only thing I don't want to venture into is live stock tickers 😬

We’re increasing 2x MCP units on all @ahrefs plans.

MCP has been our fastest growing product this year, and we’re investing in making it faster, better, and available to more customers.

My talk at BrightonSEO last week turned out to be the most shared of the entire event. 🥳

Just one slight issue: It hasn't happened yet, I didn't give any talks, and the quote is made up.

I know @lilyraynyc has had these fake quotes attributed to her, but it's weird to see for many end up/will end up influencing AI responses.

Today marks 1 year since Detailed and I officially joined Ahrefs 🥳

(How quickly did that go?)

Tons of highlights for me personally, but a few that come to mind:

- Documented 250+ product updates and proudly announced a few, like API access on Lite+ plans

- Shared data and at places like the BBC, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, The Verge, and Business Insider

- Beat @timsoulo in a head-to-head webinar on Ahrefs use cases (the "loser" donated to Children in Need), and got to review his upcoming book

- It's probably nothing to most people, but scrolling LinkedIn and seeing my blog posts translated into other languages was very cool

- Watched the Detailed SEO Extension grow by ~180K weekly users and get some great new features

- Helped launch Letaido and market products like our MCP, which keeps hitting usage records and thousands of people try for the first time each week

- Gave up pronouncing Ahrefs as A-H-refs. So much quicker now as "Aitchrefs" 😅

After being an Ahrefs customer for 10+ years, getting to nerd out about SEO and AI with smart colleagues and an absolute ton of data has been as fun as I hoped it would be.

Lots more content, product updates, and launches on the way.

Cheers! 🙌

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 h-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! 🙌

It's great to be back on the Ahrefs blog. ahrefs.com/blog/discussio…

Excited to share this one 🙏

(Also hoping to be on the blog next week with some new AI search insights.)

Picked up a small mention in today's Business Insider article alongside @suganthan.

(My quote was a small part of a much longer reply.)

More interesting is that they were able to get both OpenAI and Reddit to respond.

It's intermittently behind a paywall so I don't think I wording, but will say there was nothing controversial in their responses.

businessinsider.com/what-reddit-ch…

It's available on Apple News if you're a subscriber there.

Here's what public companies have said about AI & SEO in the past few days.

AI has had an obvious impact on search traffic, and in raw numbers hasn't been able to replace it.

Over the years I've reported on this, companies have been fairly consistent in saying referrals from AI don'age of their overall traffic, but bring higher-intent visitors.

Different businesses are of course impacted in different ways.

It makes logical sense that AI platforms aren't getting all of the attribution "credit" from their recommendations, but that's probably a topic for another post.

This is my first time sharing a quote from Hostelworld, which I've been learning more about.

While they're known as a budget travel platform, they're growing on the social network side, with messaging between members up 65% year over year.

When asked about AI platforms being a source of customers, CEO Gary Morrison said, "I think the rules are still being written about how you get cited and how you get traffic. It's a bit of a watching brief."

He also mentioned they had no plans to sell their data to help improve LLMs, and would be using it as their moat to increase revenue.

As always, there's much more to investor updates than I can share in these summaries, so always do your own research before making investment or marketing decisions.

I love diving into these calls, and hope these simplified takes are still interesting.

Today, Ahrefs is launching a brand-new adaptive model for organic traffic estimates.

We've refreshed the weights we apply to SERP features, including AI Overviews, and the calculations behind those will update on a more frequent basis.

For some sites you'll see only minimal rs the difference will be more pronounced.

We're taking our time to make sure it performs as we expect, so for now it's opt-in only via Settings in Site Explorer.

If you switch to the adaptive model, you'll see updated stats across Site Explorer, except for backlink reports and the 'Top organic competitors' widget.

Historical data is also affected, though anything earlier than February 2025 uses the state of the model as it was in that month.

You can use the new model in our API by passing the traffic_mode=adaptive parameter.

We're happy with what we're seeing so far, but there may be some oddities, and we would appreciate any feedback as we continue to improve it.

You can DM me here and I can pass it on to the right people, or please feel free to reach out to Ahrefs via the usual channels if you have any comments.

Thank you! 🙌

AI search has a spam problem. → ChatGPT cited 80 spammy websites last month.

Guess how many spammy sites (with no search traffic) Google cited in AI Overviews?

Zero!

And it's not just ChatGPT:

▪️ Perplexity cited 33 spam sites.
▪️ Copilot, a whopping 122.

These numbers come by Glen Allsopp (@ViperChill ), who used @Ahrefs’ Brand Radar to study the top 1,000 websites cited by each platform over the past six months.

Now, having zero search traffic (according to @Ahrefs' data) doesn't automatically make a site spammy. So Glen manually reviewed hundreds of domains and many of them were pretty bad:

- Fake authors, or no authors at all
- Thousands of AI-generated articles with no obvious theme
- eCommerce stores stuffed with 100K+ random products

In other words, AI chatbots are suffering from the spam problem that Google solved years ago.

But it’s not that they can't solve it.

ChatGPT seems to be making clear progress with the number of low quality sites in each citations going down every month (see on the attached graph). Others don’t seem to be on the right track at the moment, but I’m sure they’ll get to it.

...

The main takeaway for marketers is pretty simple:

Whatever loopholes work today for getting cited in AI search with low-quality spam sites are going to stop working very soon.

I’m not sure if AI chatbots will introduce penalties for those trying to game them, like Google does. But I'd still recommend playing it safe and not getting carried away with short-term hacks.

...

Follow @ViperChill (and me) for more no-BS data-driven insights about AI search. 😉

Each week, thousands of people try out the Ahrefs MCP for the very first time.

If you've ever wondered, "What should I ask?", here's a guide to hopefully inspire some starting points.
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The aim is never to replace human insights, but to help scale what you already know how to tional perspective on your potential next steps.

Some angles are specific and actionable, and others ("Your job is to increase traffic…") can just be fun to see what's brought up.
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For Detailed, Claude mentioned I should refresh some of my studies that were popular in the past, and give more love to "top [category] blogs" pages.

Both valid!

I’m biased, but our API (and thus MCP) both keep getting better as we update our current endpoints and add new ones, so I’ll share some more practical guides on getting the most out of those soon.

Hopefully the graphic is useful 🤝

The Detailed SEO Extension just passed 600,000 weekly users. 🥳

A huge thank you to everyone who continues to use and share it. I genuinely never expected it to reach so many people.

Some recent updates (with lots more on the way):

- The "hidden" right-click menu (which only ght text on a page) now lets you check for duplicate content across the site you're on, or the web

- The Social tab now lets you see how a post will look on social media before it's shared, including the image, headline, and description

- The Images tab now shows thumbnails of each image so they're easier to find, with tabs to separate those with and without alt text

- The Links tab was updated to better separate Internal and External links on a page, and more clearly highlight links with the nofollow attribute

These changes that rolled out over the past few weeks, but as I say, we have quite a few more on the to do list.

It's still a highlight for me when people share screenshots of something and I randomly see the purple D icon in their extension bar 😅

Thank you!