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 (separate) twice-per-year 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!

New research: I analyzed 70K+ AI responses over 4 weeks to see how often the same brands are named for the same prompts. ​ 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: ​ - The "core" of a response barely 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 ​ 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. ​ 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 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! 🙌

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 should share the exact wording, but will say there was nothing controversial in their responses. businessinsider.com/what-red… It's available on Apple News if you're a subscriber there.

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. ​ The aim is never to replace human insights, but to help scale what you already know how to do, and provide an additional 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. ​ 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 appears when you highlight 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!

NEW: My first research report into how companies are deploying AI to grow ✨ I've wanted to write this for a long time, and went through hundreds of notes to put this first edition together. I'm calling the series "Deployed", and would love to make it a regular thing if there's interest. The aim was to share enough examples that no matter what kind of business you're in, you'll be inspired by at least a few of them. Inside you'll find insights from the great reporting of others (with links for further reading), as well as stats and quotes I uncovered which seemed to go under the radar. I'm still as obsessed with SEO (and now, AI search) as ever, but also excited about the possibilities AI has opened up for all aspects of growing businesses online. I really hope you find it valuable, and would sincerely appreciate any feedback on whether you would like to see a v2. Link in the graphic and first reply. Thank you!

Google's AI search competitors continue to have a quality problem. ​ By the metrics I have available, they still prominently cite questionable domains. ​ Using Ahrefs Brand Radar, I analyzed the top 1,000 sites cited by each platform over the past six months. Ranking well in Google doesn't automatically mean a website is valuable, but once again I've manually looked at hundreds that thrive in AI but struggle in search, and a significant number… aren't great. ​ Fake or no authors. Thousands of AI-created articles with no obvious theme. eCommerce stores with 100K+ random items, etc. (To be clear, there are exceptions such as sites which recently launched, redirected, or shut down, but the quality problem is easy to spot.) ​ ChatGPT appears to be making progress, while Perplexity is trending in the wrong direction. Copilot looks steady, but the number of zero-traffic domains it cites is at its highest. The three platforms had just 24 low-traffic in common for June. This analysis should be viewed as directional rather than definitive. My primary goal is to see when they've made major improvements in the quality of the sites referenced. ​ I still believe we'll see a major shift at some point — particularly from ChatGPT — so I'll keep tracking the numbers. ​ I've added a few more notes at detailed forward-slash zero.txt. 🤝 ​ If nothing else, I think it's pretty interesting to watch them tackle a challenge Google has been working on for so long. ​ P.S. It’s admittedly possible the zero traffic domains rank for *something* in Google, but they currently don't rank for anything across the entire Ahrefs database.

Ahrefs' Domain Rating endpoint is now free! You don't even need an API key. I built a tool to show it off (and possibly send you some visitors?) 🎉 The idea is simple: Enter your site, reveal your DR, and find other sites with the same score. If you like, you can also submit your domain to be one of the recommendations, and potentially get some visitors sent your way. See it in action over on detailed dotcom /dr/ Of course, I'm not expecting this to go viral in any way, but you might reach a few marketers and webmasters in your niche. The idea is a little cheesy, I know, but I had to test out the new endpoint myself. Simplified, DR aims to show the strength of a website's backlink profile compared to other sites in the Ahrefs database. It works on a 0-100 scale, and can be useful for quick competitor benchmarking, link prospecting, outreach prioritization, and more. To give some context on the numbers... Wikipedia: DR 97 Ahrefs: DR 91 YCombinator: DR 91 Tinder: DR 82 Detailed: DR 73 Even if you're not technically savvy, it's still super easy to use. Point your AI assistant of choice straight to the Ahrefs API docs, and it will figure out the rest. Hopefully you find this new endpoint useful in your workflows! 🙌

100M+ data points. 13 studies. 8 authors. One AI search benchmark report. ✨ I'm excited to share the research the Ahrefs team has put together over the past two quarters in one cohesive resource. We've analyzed responses across AI Overviews, AI Mode, and ChatGPT, and even ran our very own misinformation experiment. Some key highlights: - In an analysis of 75K brands, YouTube mentions correlated most strongly with AI visibility 🖥️ - AI Overviews appear for 21% of all keywords (with that rate varying by category and query length) 🔑 - Across 76K websites using Ahrefs Web Analytics, Google sends 190x more traffic than ChatGPT 📈 I wouldn't be doing my job as a marketer unless I said there are some other big findings in the full report. 😬 Special thanks to those who agreed to have their comments featured. We often share these internally, so it's cool to be able to show them off a little. I would love to convince Tim & Ryan to let me do this again for the next batch of research, so any likes, comments, and shares are much appreciated! (I'm linking to it directly in the first reply.) Thank you!

Here's what public companies have said about AI & SEO in the past few days. It's nice to report on SEO wins, and that AI traffic continues to convert well. Of course, AI and changing user habits have not been kind to a lot of companies that were reliant on search. Traffic diversification is top of mind for many of them. There also seems to be a lot of genuine excitement around AI as a whole, and not just from SaaS companies, but from eCommerce stores and marketplaces as well. I think there are some much bigger marketing stories to tell there, so look out for some upcoming (free) reports on that topic. I’m hoping to have the first one live in a couple of weeks. As always, there's more to investor updates than I can share in these summaries, so please do your own research before making investment or marketing decisions. Thanks for reading! 🤝

Big news: Ahrefs just added two new features to paid plans (at no extra cost). Prompt tracking for AI visibility (!), and always-on site audits. 🥳 I had a *small* part to play in the former, but the latter was a surprise to me. These new features are available for Lite plans and above. For AI visibility, you get 150, 300, or 600 prompt "checks" to use however you like. On the Standard plan that could be 75 prompts checked weekly on ChatGPT, 10 prompts daily, or 100 prompts monthly across three platforms. You decide on the platforms and schedule. Even with the recent opening of the API and the launch of Firehose, there are still some big announcements on the way. I'll share them here as soon as they're ready. P.S. I can't offer support here, but if you have any requests or feedback, I’ll do my best to curate replies and share them with the relevant teams. Thank you!

In the six months since joining Ahrefs, I've documented 130+ product updates. Each month I like to share some of my favourites, so here's four from February.... (The carousel on LI has screenshots, but I've tried to attached some images here as well.) #1. Brand Radar can now show whether you're mentioned *within the content* of the URLs AI cites. You'll also see the 'Page Type' of each link, as we have it (currently tagging ~300M pages monthly). #2. Competitive Analysis gets a new tab to play with: Paid keywords. Uncover keyword opportunities across search advertising campaigns, including common paid terms, and any overlaps with organic rankings. #3. Google Maps visibility is here. Track your local search performance through key actions like calls, directions, and website clicks. You can also compare data across locations. #4. I pushed for this one: Tag the prompts you're using to monitor AI visibility. It's a simple idea, but makes it so much easier to filter through different prompt clusters around intent, or queries covering specific products and services. ** With these posts I'm hoping to make it easier for Ahrefs customers to see what we've been working on, so please let me know if these continue to be useful. (And I'll be honest, it would be cool if they convince someone new to check out Ahrefs as well). March has already been crazy with announcements of Firehose and API access for (almost) all paid plans, but we still have something very big to share… 😬

February was a record for new Ahrefs sign-ups self-attributed to AI. 🤖 Mentions of Claude grew the most, and are on track to double in March. AI referrals only account for a small % of sign-ups — and we understandably get a lot of general answers ("social media") — but it's really nice to see the channel growing. (If multiple platforms were mentioned in a response, we didn't count it, so the numbers are technically a bit higher). As I've said before, I'm aware that self-attribution data isn't perfect. It’s affected by recency and recall bias, and it's not easy to account for every variation and typo. It's not the only data source we look at, but it's fun to dive into. (And especially interesting when people talk about specific YouTube channels, podcasts, blog posts, and so on, which convinced them to join.) I report on so many other companies talking about how AI is impacting their marketing, so I think we should do a bit more on that front as well. Hopefully it's interesting! 🤝

I'm biased, but I think companies are growing more optimistic about AI search. Context is important (let's not scare investors), but it feels like a shift. And I'm not just saying that because of these latest earnings calls. Of course, I shouldn't make light of the fact that search traffic declines have been devastating for some, and AI referrals have a lot of ground to make up. Certain businesses will have *much* more opportunity here than others. But increasing conversion rates certainly help with some of the traffic loss. AI Overviews and AI chat experiences have pushed many companies to diversify elsewhere (social, increased ad budgets, newsletters, etc.), but others genuinely seem to see them as an opportunity. I have a lot more thoughts that I’ll cover in a longer post, but I wanted to make sure I shared this latest summary before the weekend. Please keep in mind that they're simplified takes from much larger conversations, and there's always more to the story. I lean towards finding the positives, but never want to overhype anything. I've been covering these updates for years now, and I still enjoy diving in as much as ever. Thank you for reading them 🙌

Since joining Ahrefs five months ago, I've documented 106 product updates. Here are my favourite announcements from January… (This looks a bit better on LinkedIn where there are additional images, so I've also included some commentary) 1. AI visibility reports now include traditional search metrics Now, when you look up the top cited domains and pages for the prompts you care about, you'll see some familiar stats. Site / page traffic, Domain Rating and URL Rating have been added first, with more on the way. 2. Historical ranking data for newly tracked keywords If you add new keywords to Rank Tracker, you can import historical ranking data so your reporting no longer starts from scratch. Optionally, you can also add years of ranking history to terms you're already monitoring. 3. The Social Media Manager tool has had some serious upgrades There are almost too many to cover here, including the ability to leave the first comment on posts, improved performance charts and enabling multiple attachments per post. It's currently free (including unlimited posts and channel connections) for all account levels. 4. Generate custom prompts to track your AI visibility We take your brand, competitors and (optional) custom instructions to generate relevant prompts to monitor responses for. You can still enter prompts manually, and use this new tool for inspiration on angles to tweak. We'll soon ground prompt suggestions in keyword and website data to take this to the next level. ** I bought my first Ahrefs subscription over 12 years ago, and it wasn't until I joined the company that I realized how often new updates go live. That was the primary inspiration behind this new 'Ahrefs Ships' angle. If seeing monthly product updates in this way is useful, please let me know and I'll keep these coming every month 🙌

I'm back on the Ahrefs blog, sharing my thoughts on custom prompt tracking. I like to think I've shared some practical ideas without overhyping the insights you can derive from it (or many prompts you should track). This has understandably been a divisive topic in SEO over the past few months, which is something I generally avoid. But, like I did with my listicles research, I spoke with people strongly for and against it, and combined that with my own experiences. AI search responses are something I like to monitor myself, so thought I would share how I choose queries to track, and what I’m looking to get out of them. I'm sure my thoughts will evolve here over time as interfaces change, data sources improve and models are updated, but here's where I'm at for now. I hope you find it useful! P.S. It's the latest post on the Ahrefs blog, and I'll also link to it in the comments below. Thank you! 🙏

I built a free tool to show how consistent AI responses are, live. Asking the same question 500+ times, I recorded all commonalities. Specifically, I looked at things like overall brand consistency, and how often brands appeared in the exact same order. This project was entirely inspired by @randfish, whom I also credit on the page itself. Rand encouraged people to share more data here, so I took that personally. 🙃 I've built countless AI response analysis tools over the past ~18 months, but loved the approach from his latest report. I had a few more angles I wanted to look at, so I put them on a page that's being updated every hour. This is the first version of the tool so forgive me if there are oddities or if I didn't explain anything properly. I would love your suggestions for how to improve it going forward. Link is in the comments below (and the graphic). No opt-in required etc. 🤝

I built a free keyword research tool via the Wikipedia API (updated for 2026). If Wikipedia ranks for a term you care about, you can get an *idea* of how much traffic Google is sending their way. Of course, there are lots of caveats to include here, like people finding those pages other than via Google, pages ranking for multiple terms, etc., but I've still had a lot of fun with this over the years. Wikipedia appears to do a great job separating real users from bots, and I only share real user stats. Technically, I'm using both the Wikimedia and Wikipedia APIs. Unfortunately, my understanding is that the Wikimedia Analytics API will no longer be a thing in ~6 months, so I made some updates for 2026 while we can still play with it. It's totally free, with no opt-in required. Link is in the replies below (and the graphic). If you have any feature suggestions please let me know. 🤝

In the four months since joining Ahrefs, I've documented 83 product updates. Here are three of my favourites from December. Page #4 of the carousel (on LinkedIn) gives you a much better idea of what these features look like, but it's only fair that I write them out as well. #1. Custom prompt tracking Easily the most requested feature that I've seen. While Brand Radar's dataset has been a huge success (it's Ahrefs' fastest-growing product), lots of people wanted to customize the queries we show responses for. Choose the platforms, location & schedule you like, without needing a separate Brand Radar subscription. We have some big plans here on the way, so stay tuned for those. #2. Page and category types on backlink reports Find the most niche-relevant links pointing to any site, and filter them across 100+ unique page types. Page types also appear on any individual SERP overview. We're currently classifying around 12M pages per hour. #3. Keyword research goes global Keywords Explorer now supports including (or excluding) the languages of your choice. I'm "cheating" slightly in that English translations under each term were added in January, but I love that I can now see those as well. ** I bought my first Ahrefs subscription over 12 years ago, and it wasn't until I joined the company that I realized how often new updates go live. (I'm biased, of course, but I genuinely mean that). You may have noticed I'm trying out a brand new style with this post. You've also probably guessed it was designed as a LI carousel so doesn't "work" as well here unfortunately. If seeing monthly product updates in this way is useful, please let me know with a ‘Like’ or comment so I can convince Tim to let me do these every month 😬