Category: SEO

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,…

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…

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…

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,…

We analyzed 900,000 newly created web pages in April 2025 and found that 74.2% of them contained AI-generated content. At Ahrefs, our machine learning team has built an AI content detector (codenamed bot_or_not). We’re about to release the AI content detector for Ahrefs customers to use, so we decided to put it through its paces…

According to Google, AI Overviews (AIOs) had over 1.5 billion users a month in Q1 2025. That would be 18.3% of all the people on the planet or 26.6% of all internet users. That’s a massive reach. In traditional Ahrefs fashion, I wanted to do the largest data study ever done on AIOs to see…

AI is reshaping search optimization—it’s no longer just about ranking in search results, but about earning visibility in AI-generated answers. We’re moving from chasing traffic, to competing for brand visibility. We’re thinking about how AI crawlers view our site–not just search engine bots. We’re trying to follow the breadcrumb trail through an entirely new kind…

Back in 2017, we conducted a study to answer a simple yet important question: How old are the top-ranking pages in Google? The results were eye-opening and became one of our most-referenced data studies. Clients and stakeholders often ask, “How long till my website (page) ranks on top of Google?” You could say “it depends”…

Managing PPC campaigns means juggling more than just keywords and budgets. From creative production and landing page optimization to fraud detection and competitor research, the marketer’s toolbox needs to be practical and scalable. To help you with that, I looked at some of the best PPC tools and picked nine that stand out for their…