Category: SEO

Here’s the complete process I use to publish high-quality AI content on the Ahrefs blog. I’ll be honest: there are parts of my job that I don’t like. Writing my 500th article on content gap analysis because we found a new long-tail keyword to target. Listing out the features of 30 free SEO tools for yet…

There are plenty of website metrics out there, and just as many tools to track them. So, to clear up the confusion, I’ll show you the key metrics that really matter, explain how to make sense of them, and show you how to do it all with one free, privacy-friendly tool that’s ready for the AI age.…

Has AI and social media killed SEO in 2025? Not even close. Here’s the thing: on one side, we’ve got how people feel about SEO these days—the doom-and-gloom headlines, the panic about zero-click searches, the fear that AI has made everything obsolete. But on the other hand, the data tells a totally different story. The data says…

Do AI assistants like ChatGPT and Perplexity prefer to cite “fresh” content? We analyzed 17 million citations across 7 AI search platforms to find out. As we clamor to optimize for AI search visibility, I’ve seen suggestions that we should update pages more frequently to boost their chance of being cited. To test the theory, we used…

Ever since AI Overviews began decimating clicks in organic search, I’ve had two questions on my mind: “What kind of AI Overview keywords still drive clicks?”, and “Is there a way to engineer more clicks from zero-click search?” I asked our ace data scientist, Xibeijia, if she could help me build a profile of “AI…

Google provides a solid set of free SEO tools. From simple keyword research to performance tracking, you can stitch together a full workflow without spending a dime. Every SEO—whether beginner or expert—uses Google’s free tools in some capacity. They’re widely accessible, they offer a glimpse into how Google’s search and advertising systems work, and they’re often…

We analyzed 1,000,000 SERPs to see how the presence of different SERP features has changed since the start of the year. AI Overviews appeared from nowhere in August 2024, and now appear on over a quarter of the keywords in this sample (and they’re much more prevalent for informational keywords). Functionally, AI Overviews seem to overlap…

If you rank well in traditional search results, does that mean you’ll get cited in AI Overviews? We decided to find out. We pulled one million keywords that triggered AI Overviews and extracted the top three links cited within those AIOs: a total of 1.9 million citation links in our database. We then analyzed the relationship…

How much do traditional and AI search results overlap?  AI models draw on search engine indexes to enrich their static training data in a process known as retrieval augmented generation (RAG), so some crossover between AI and search results is to be expected. But how much does your visibility in search align with your presence…

Get the week’s best marketing content AI Overviews aren’t always in the first position in the SERPs. For example, here’s an AI Overview in the 2nd position. See where AI Overviews appear outside of position 1 You can use the SERP features filter along with the Position filter to find some of the AI Overviews outside…