SEO Consultant, Product Advisor, Speaker, Author, Community Builder | Ex Ahrefs & IBM. “The Technical SEO’s technical SEO” Tech SEO Connect, Triangle SEO Meetup
The World of AI
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Today is my last day at Ahrefs after 6.5+ years. Incredibly proud to have helped shape such an amazing product.
I plan to do some consulting and build some things. Let me know if you need help. Potentially open to the right in-house opportunity.
Likes / shares appreciated🙏
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Uncommon SEO Knowledge #2 Titles and Meta Descriptions + Snippets
Let's see if I can cover something most SEOs don't know about the tags they're most familiar with. (thread)
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Uncommon SEO Knowledge #1 HTTPS
I think most people know HTTPS is a very lightweight ranking signal for Google. Here's what you might not know about HTTPS and things that may be useful to know as an SEO.
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I'm generally considered one of the best Technical SEOs around and I've been working on @ahrefs Site Audit for almost 4 years now.
It's great, and we keep making it better.
Here are my 10 favorite, little known use cases. 🧵
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Now in @ahrefs, if you look at an individual page, you can enable "Content changes" to see when the page content was changed and how the changes impacted traffic.
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I've worked with site speed a lot but never wrote about it until now! I hope this helps SEOs understand speed better and what their options are to improve their site. Check it out on the @ahrefs blog. ahrefs.com/blog/advanced-pag…
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I'm going to start a new series called uncommon SEO knowledge. Each week I'll pick a topic and tweet out some interesting things about the topic throughout the week. Others are encouraged to add their own info as well. What kind of topics would you like to see covered?
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I couldn't be more excited for this!
We've always dreamed of having a truly technical SEO on the Ahrefs team.
Today, that dream comes true...
...and we can't be more thrilled that it's @patrickstox.
A super warm welcome to Patrick – he'll be contributing to both our product and content, so look forward to it!
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-Does the disavow tool still work? ✅
-Do links still have an impact?✅
-Are we crazy enough at @ahrefs to disavow all links (including good ones 😱) to some posts just to see what happens? ✅
A short thread below with details, or just check out the blog. ahrefs.com/blog/impact-of-li…
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I know there are jokes about the virus hurting beer sales @corona and whether that's true or not, blocking search engines from crawling the website since 2016 probably doesn't help things.
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Thread Warning (1): Here's how the AMA with @methode changed my understanding of search. I'm always happy to learn things and now I have more questions. There's more on Reddit than I will cover, these are just my thoughts before and after. teddit.net/r/TechSEO/comment…
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I'm a technical SEO who wrote about creating content.
Why? Well, I create a lot of content and have created many content strategies and unique processes around this and had personal insights to share.
Enjoy this thread with highlights or read it all at ahrefs.com/blog/how-to-write…
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Technical SEO pop quiz. Who can tell me why this is happening to gmail?
I'll share the answer later if no one gets it right.
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My slides from #Pubcon. International SEO: The Weird Technical Parts including misconceptions, things you can get away with, and how to troubleshoot. slideshare.net/mobile/patric…
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ChatGPT and Perplexity indexes are now live in @ahrefs Brand Radar! Gemini coming soon and some others in the works.
This isn't another rank tracker / LLM visibility monitor. Think Site Explorer for LLMs with a large amount of data being tracked.
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Now in @ahrefs Rank Tracker, you can see the full history of your Google Search Console data.
We also include the percent clicks that go to anonymized queries. Read ahrefs.com/blog/gsc-hidden-t… for more info.
There's also a custom CTR curve based on your own data. 💕
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Sometimes I have imposter syndrome when writing. It started ~8 years ago when I pitched my first article. A person at a popular SEO blog told me:
"Our audience craves actionable, in-depth information, and your post is quite basic".
Don't be like that person. I almost gave up.
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Meta.
Since people learned you can turn off AI overviews by using curse words, it looks like more people are cursing while searching.
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We added the ability to see changes to your SERP titles in @ahrefs Top Pages 2.0.
For us it looks like 781/2114 were changed. I don't mean changed from what was on the site in the <title> but what used to be shown on the SERP.
Here's how you can use it and what we found. thread
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Most SEOs consider GSC their source of truth. Do you trust the data to be accurate?
We ran a study and across 146,741 websites and nearly 9 billion total clicks. Almost half of the clicks go to terms they don't show you.
ahrefs.com/blog/gsc-hidden-t…
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The Keywords Explorer tool in @ahrefs got a nice visual upgrade. You can now get a sense of the size of the opportunities for content creation, especially when grouped by parent topic.
You can switch between the normal list view and a treemap view.
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Uh oh, this isn't good for @reddit. The pages from the protesting communities are going to start dropping out of search engines because of this noindex tag.
It's going to be interesting to see the traffic impact of this.
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Uncommon SEO Knowledge #3 Paginated Series
This is a hot topic with a differing opinions on what's best for SEO. There are technicalities, mixed messages from search reps that create unknowns, and some additional nuance.
Sounds like fun, so let's dig in!
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Wrote some info on JavaScript SEO on the @ahrefs blog. Should be useful for SEOs and devs.
Contents
-What is JavaScript SEO?
-How Google processes pages with JavaScript
-Testing / troubleshooting
-Render options
-Making your JavaScript site SEO friendly
ahrefs.com/blog/javascript-s…
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For ahrefs.com, 0.5% of visitors in the last month were from AI Search, but those were 12.1% of our signups.
This conversion rate is 23x higher than we get from traditional organic search.
See other metrics + take a peek at the scary future:
ahrefs.com/blog/ai-search-tr…
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Now in the @ahrefs Top Pages report, you can see which pages of yours, or competitors, had changes between any 2 selectable dates, and see what was changed.
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What do technical SEO issues look like across 1,002,165 websites? We ran the largest site audit study ever to find out!
I included personal commentary for the top issues.
Check it out:
ahrefs.com/blog/site-audit-s…
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Google to SEOs: don't use automatic translations.
Google: We're going to do automatic translations for you, and show our site instead.
Google being Google... nice writeup from @erik_sarissky
ahrefs.com/blog/google-is-st…
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If companies had to pay for organic traffic like they do for ads, that cost from Google would have been ~$1T last quarter.
Invest more in SEO.
Rough calculations and poor assumptions based on paid/organic split of 4.5%/95.5% and based on Google's Q4 2021 ad revenue of $43.3B.
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Interesting results from a test on AI content from @thetafferboy. 10,000 PAA results scraped and answered by ChatGPT. It worked until it didn't. @lilyraynyc #Pubcon
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Now in @ahrefs, AI Content Helper. This actually scores your content (and competitor content) based on topic coverage instead of keywords.
Check it out and let us know your feedback. Everyone has access while this is in beta.
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I removed older redirects from pages that had lots of links pointing to them and you won't believe what happened next! Or you will believe it. Or you'll be skeptical of it. Who knows?
ahrefs.com/blog/are-pemanent…
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Whoa. @DuaneForrester says Wikipedia lost 21% of their traffic when featured snippets were released. #Pubcon
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AI citations are now in @ahrefs Site Explorer. You can see the numbers and changes from our Brand Radar indexes on all plans, but to see the actual mentions and citations, you'll have to subscribe to Brand Radar.
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One of the hardest things for SEOs to learn is how to prioritize their efforts. This guide should help you understand some of the basics of technical SEO and also where you can spend your time to maximize your impact. ahrefs.com/blog/technical-se…
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This blog was personal to me. I looked back at my time working with enterprise companies and really thought about what worked well, what didn't, and what I would do differently now. I hope it helps people who may be in similar situations. ahrefs.com/blog/enterprise-s…
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It’s my birthday, but I have a present for you. The latest study from @ahrefs is on link rot.
We sampled over 2 million domains and looked at the link profile since 2013. 74.5% of the links are lost with 66.5% of them being considered link rot. (Thread)
ahrefs.com/blog/link-rot-stu…
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Someone registered contentgoblins.com today. Which one of you was it?
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SEO has gotten more technical, it used to be much simpler. You have to be part developer, part content marketer, part brand strategist or have teams of those and work across silos to be successful. @MichelleRobbins #SMX
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I'm so excited! We now have an hreflang cluster visualization in @ahrefs Site Audit.
Not only does it help you visibly see the issues, there's a table below with more details on the connections including where they were found.
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I think SEOs trust Google data a little too much. Some consider this 1st party data, but it's not.
It's still 3rd party and they have mistakes, the same as 3rd party SEO tool data has mistakes. But y'all seem to always think the SEO tools are wrong. 😿
Some examples 🧵
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No one ever asked me to write an article about technical SEO for enterprise companies, but I wrote one anyway.
ahrefs.com/blog/enterprise-t…
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I looked at dozens of examples of sites going viral, award winners, case studies, etc.
I thought for sure all those links from major news sites would help the sites rank better for other terms.
Spoiler alert: I was wrong.
ahrefs.com/blog/viral-seo/
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My slides from #BrightonSEO on canonicalization for those who couldn't make.
Tons of different signals (not just canonical tags), lots of info on redirect consolidation for temporary/ permanent and time frames, and an interesting tradeoff with hreflang.
slideshare.net/ahrefs/canoni…
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LLMs.txt is still dumb. Y'all should stop pushing it. Nothing has changed.
The AI bots should learn to crawl better... Don't make extra copies of a site. Don't make website owners do more work. Don't make it easy for competitors to scrape.
Read: ahrefs.com/blog/what-is-llms…
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Forecasts using 3rd party data from @ahrefs help with sales / justifying resources. ahrefs.com/blog/seo-forecast…
Use cases:
-Predict your own traffic or traffic value
-Compare against competitors
-Page forecasts help you schedule content updates
-See how a core update may impact you
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A new guide to crawl budget on the @ahrefs blog. I also included some information on how Google adjusts their crawling over time. ahrefs.com/blog/crawl-budget…
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"SEO checklists are impractical at scale. It’s a waste of time to check every little thing on every page because there’s simply no ROI in doing so, and no one is going to read your 200-page SEO audit." ahrefs.com/blog/enterprise-s…
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I'll take things that aren't ranking factors for 500 Alex.
It’s finally here, our Google Ranking Factors Study! It's a burning question for webmasters and SEOs.
social.semrush.com/3vfsMF5.
Despite Google's guidelines, there seems to be confusion caused by conflicting advice & regular updates. Our solution? The power of data!💡@marcustober
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I have arrived at #BrightonSEO
Come see my session tomorrow on machine learning for technical SEO. I have an awesome release y'all will love.
Surprise! I'll also be at the @ahrefs booth performing SEO themed magic tricks and challenges! Come say hello and be part of the show.
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What's there is nonsense. Originality is rarely rewarded. It's pretty much impossible for new info to get mentioned until others repeat it. What they want is consensus.
A must read: ahrefs.com/blog/llms-flatten…
Curious about AI in Search and your website? We just launched two new documentation pages and a blog post with some general tips on what to think about with regards to these new Search experiences. Check out the blog post at developers.google.com/search…
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People wonder why many new folks don't want to write or speak.
If you're public facing, your every word will be scrutinized. Especially if it's something new, something controversial, or something you have an opinion on.
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"We need very few links to rank pages... Over the years we've made links less important." @methode #serpconf2024
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SEOs interpret things based on their own knowledge, experiences, and bias. You shouldn't assume these are ranking factors or even used in ranking unless it's specifically stated.
ahrefs.com/blog/google-docum…
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SEO breakdown of apple.com
Kind of a mess technically like many other big sites, yet still ranks mostly for branded terms. They trigger most issues in Site Audit. They could spend a lot of time cleaning things up that probably wouldn't have much impact.
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My slides from #Pubcon on how search works.
Crawling, Rendering, Indexing, Protocol Buffers, Query Parsing, Retrieval, Ranking, Re-Ranking, Query Expansion, lots of systems, how big the internet is, ...
There's something here for everyone.
slideshare.net/ahrefs/how-se…
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Do links really matter less? We ran a study on 1 million SERPs and we looked at historical comparisons, segments for branded, local, search intent, and search volume. Check it out at ahrefs.com/blog/links-matter…
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Hot take. People focus too much on matching intent to what's ranking.
There's a lot of great and interesting content that isn't ranking.
It's Google's fault if they're choosing to show essentially the same article over and over instead of showing something unique and different
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I've been at @ahrefs for 5 years now. 🤯
I'm truly grateful to work with so many amazing people at such a great company!
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What can you learn from the largest Core Web Vitals data study?
For one, @ahrefs pulled page level data from 43.66M unique pages, but only 5.21M or 11.9% had any Core Web Vitals metrics. 😱
Here's a 🧵with interesting insights from the study
ahrefs.com/blog/core-web-vit…
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This will be an interesting case study to watch. One of the recommended link building tactics is to host events. Four Seasons Total Landscaping knocked it out of the park with a booking and I expect the RD's to skyrocket. I'm interested to see the impact of the publicity.
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AIOs show mostly for informational queries that are not monetized.
Another @ahrefs study found that AIOs reduced clicks by 34.5%.
If the content wasn't valuable enough to put $$$ behind it, how much will AIOs really impact the bottom line of companies?
ahrefs.com/blog/insights-fro…
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Ever wanted to know what terms Google isn't showing you in Google Search Console? The ones they call "anonymous queries". We matched @ahrefs data with GSC data and now you can see this info in the Anonymized Queries report in the GSC section. 🧵
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Uncommon SEO Knowledge #5 Hreflang (part 1)
Apparently there's a 25 tweet limit in threads and I have too much to say.
Google is getting rid of the reporting for this in Google Search Console and it has some interesting implications for SEOs who work internationally.🧵
The International Targeting report has been deprecated, and will be removed from Search Console soon. We continue to support hreflang and our recommendations for managing multilingual and multiregional sites still stand. developers.google.com/search…
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Link building is a waste of time. Instead of wasting time on link building spend the time writing better content and focusing on UX and user intent. @mediadonis #SMX
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Tech SEO Connect, the conference made for technical SEOs by technical SEOs, is just over 2 weeks away!
Here's a 🧵about why I'm excited for the conference.
Bonus - reshare this post to enter a giveaway for a free ticket. I’ll announce a winner at the end of the week.
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There's a lot of SEO drama on Twitter today. It's really not healthy. Do what you can to educate people and share knowledge instead.
Here's a bit of a personal story. I once considered starting a blog to call out all of the wrong things said in industry articles, instead...
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1. I added snippets because meta descriptions are not always used in search results. According to an @ahrefs study ahrefs.com/blog/meta-descrip…:
25.02% of top-ranking pages don’t have a meta description
and
Google uses different text than the meta description 62.78% of the time
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While it's still early in the December 2020 Google Core Update, you can use @ahrefs new Site Explorer 2.0 reports to compare changes in pages and keywords between 2 dates. It's a quick way to see what pages or keywords may be impacted.
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Introducing Batch AI in @ahrefs Site Audit.
Now you can batch generate titles and meta descriptions instead of having an intern or new employee hate their life and waste their time writing them.
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What would you say are the cities with the strongest SEO communities?
Raleigh
Denver
London
Philly
NYC
San Francisco
Boston
Miami
Chiang Mai
Dallas
Portland
Seattle
I have an obvious US bias (sorry). What cities have awesome communities and what makes them awesome?
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I am looking forward to the Google's helpful content update. A lot of the ai generated and SEO content makes it feel like you're reading the same content on multiple sites.
Show your expertise, share your experience and insights, have an opinion, and differentiate yourself.
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I don’t think this result will come as a surprise to anyone. Websites that get more traffic in traditional organic search also get mentioned more in AI Search.
Popular sites are popular, even if the search system changes.
ahrefs.com/blog/websites-wit…
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Did y'all see this? Across ~82k sites, ChatGPT is the AI Assistant sending the most traffic by far.
Study by @Lou_Linehan ahrefs.com/blog/ai-traffic-i…
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It's been a while since I've done a thread, so let's talk for a minute about Google's new system that will roll out that looks at passages.
I've said for years if someone wants to beat Google, at least for informational queries they need basically "cliff notes" on a topic
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Not sure what to focus on to improve rankings? Check out the new "Opportunities" report in @ahrefs!
They're actions that we believe will help improve your rankings, so you won't waste time on things like rewriting 800 meta descriptions. 🙄
What would you add?
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🤔 Do you think users of Semrush and Moz actually rank worse because of their toxic link tools?
We get the request to build one a lot at Ahrefs. The feature is on many people's shopping / product comparison lists. We won't add it because users might actively harm their sites.
Google's @johnmu says it is a "terrible idea" to disavow links based on third-party metrics seroundtable.com/google-disa…
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llms.txt is dumb.
Robots.txt and sitemaps already exist and have been web standards forever. The AI crawler bots need to learn how to crawl better, not make website owners do extra work.
Nice writeup from @thinking_slow ahrefs.com/blog/what-is-llms…
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Hey y'all! I wrote about canonicalization. Surprise, it's a lot more complicated than just canonical tags, which are really called canonical link elements.
This is one of the most misunderstood parts of SEO. Check out ahrefs.com/blog/canonicaliza… or here's a thread with highlights:
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We love big data at @ahrefs. We looked at hreflang issues on 374,756 domains and found that 67% of them have issues.
You'll find all the details and more nuance on the issues in the post along with this visualization of an hreflang cluster. ❤️🧡💛💚💙💜
ahrefs.com/blog/hreflang-stu…
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Y'all know @ahrefs already built the content tool for the AI era right? We launched AI Content Helper last year.
We're pulling the topics and measuring your content against those topics using cosine similarity. It's not just one sentence though, it can be multiple sentences.🧵
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Did y'all see this? @ahrefs ran the largest AI search study ever!
76.7M AI Overviews, 957k ChatGPT prompts, and 953.5k Perplexity prompts for the month of June 2025.
See breakdowns for each AI Assistant and for impressions / potential reach:
ahrefs.com/blog/top-10-most-…
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Did you know @ahrefs will pull and store all your historical GSC data? The Overview report includes:
-Anonymized query %
-Performance by device
-Custom CTR curve
-Keyword winners/losers and new/lost
-Pages winners/losers and new/lost
-Low hanging fruit
-Potential cannibalization
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If you missed my session at #Pubcon, my slides are up. It's on international SEO mainly focused on technical and hreflang and real issues. I challenged things people present as truth and errors returned in tools. It's amazing and you should check it out. slideshare.net/mobile/patric…
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Uncommon SEO Knowledge #5 Hreflang (part 2)
Because I had too much to say, here's part 2 with even more hreflang goodness.
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A user on Reddit asks why Semrush is pushing llms.txt.
This is a waste of time for people and it has no support. They should not be wasting people's time. teddit.net/r/SEO/s/f8dLOgEhB…
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Is this the ultimate study on AI Overviews? Probably.
-Find out how much search volume they cover, not just keywords they show for.
-Distribution of AIOs vs normal queries.
-Did you know that a relatively small % of sites make up a big % of the mentions?
ahrefs.com/blog/insights-fro…
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