Category: SEO

  • Good SEO Plus Lazy Marketing Won’t Cut It Anymore

    Good SEO Plus Lazy Marketing Won’t Cut It Anymore

    by

    in

    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 Is Stealing Your International Search Traffic With Automated Translations

    Google Is Stealing Your International Search Traffic With Automated Translations

    by

    in

    Since the March Core update, there’s been a huge increase in Google’s efforts to automatically translate English-language webpages into other languages. The catch? These newly translated pages are hosted on a Google subdomain, so the original content creators don’t see any benefit from them. This coincides with the massive rollout of AI Overviews we saw alongside…

  • Almost Half of Google Searches Are Branded. Here’s Why That Matters

    Almost Half of Google Searches Are Branded. Here’s Why That Matters

    by

    in

    When most marketers think about SEO, they jump straight to keywords like “best running shoes” or “how to do [whatever]”. Non-branded, high-intent, top-of-funnel stuff. But our latest study might surprise you: Nearly half of all Google searches (45.7%) are branded searches—meaning people are actively seeking out specific companies and products they already know. Yep, nearly…

  • Generative Engines Are Breaking Web Analytics and Hurting Their Future

    Generative Engines Are Breaking Web Analytics and Hurting Their Future

    by

    in

    Search is moving from traditional search engines to generative engines, but traffic from many of these sites isn’t being tracked properly in analytics. It’s their fault, not yours. I was looking at our LLM filter in Ahrefs Web Analytics and noticed some common generative engines missing from the list. They’re in our filters, but we aren’t…

  • Strategies from Someone Who Lives It

    Strategies from Someone Who Lives It

    by

    in

    According to our upcoming study, 87% of marketers use AI for content. I’m one of them. AI helped me build a career around writing. It’s part of nearly everything I do. Honestly, I can’t even remember how I worked without it—and I don’t want to. It gives me a “second brain” and superhuman speed, and takes care…

  • What 75,000 Brands Taught Us About Getting Mentioned in AI Overviews

    What 75,000 Brands Taught Us About Getting Mentioned in AI Overviews

    by

    in

    With Google’s AI mode developments, we’re heading toward a future where search results could eventually roll up into one big AI Overview. Soon it won’t be a case of “Should I, or shouldn’t I optimize for AI Overviews?” If you want any chance of search visibility, you’ll need to understand how to rank in Google’s…

  • The SEO Bots That ~140 Million Websites Block the Most

    The SEO Bots That ~140 Million Websites Block the Most

    by

    in

    Ever wonder which SEO bots are the most blocked? This can impact the quality of the data the tools provide. Blocking these bots will mostly impact the link index of the tools. They won’t be able to crawl the pages, so they can’t check where those pages are linking. It doesn’t matter for traffic estimates,…

  • Google AI Mode Is Here, But You Can’t Track It Properly

    Google AI Mode Is Here, But You Can’t Track It Properly

    by

    in

    Get the week’s best marketing content Google just rolled out AI Mode to US users. I was testing if the clicks would show in Google Search Console, without any success. 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…

  • The AI Bots That ~140 Million Websites Block the Most

    The AI Bots That ~140 Million Websites Block the Most

    by

    in

    AI bots power some of the most advanced technologies we use today, from search engines to AI assistants. However, their increasing presence has led to a growing number of websites blocking them. There’s a cost to bots crawling your websites and there’s a social contract between search engines and website owners, where search engines add…

  • LLMO Is in Its Black Hat Era

    LLMO Is in Its Black Hat Era

    by

    in

    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,…