seo news

We know that AI assistants like ChatGPT access search indices, like Google and Bing, to retrieve URLs for their response. But how, exactly? To find out, we’ve run a series of experiments looking at the relationship between the URLs cited by AI assistants, and the results found in Google when searching for the same topics. […]

AI assistants like ChatGPT and Claude can hallucinate URLs and direct visitors to non-existent pages on your website. But how often does it happen? To find out, we looked at the http status of 16 million unique URLs cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity, Copilot, Gemini, Claude, and Mistral. We found that AI assistants send visitors to

Google announced AI Mode as a Labs experiment on 5 March 2025. Two months later, on 20 May 2025, Google rolled out AI Mode to everyone in the U.S. Just a couple of months later, Google went full steam ahead and rolled it out to India, later the UK, and now 180 more countries and territories.

Across LinkedIn threads and AI‑SEO guides, the promise is the same: format your content into perfect “chunks” and you’ll get chosen for Google’s AI Overviews or cited in AI search results. The problem? Chunk optimization isn’t actually an SEO tactic.… Read more ›

Get the week’s best marketing content Given OpenAI’s close relationship with Microsoft, many expect that ChatGPT’s retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) process would use Bing. However, over the past months, some SEOs discovered that ChatGPT may have secretly pivoted to using Google instead. These were all one-off experiments. So, I wondered if it was possible for us to

GEO, short for Generative Engine Optimization (also known as AEO or LLMO), is about getting your brand noticed—and accurately represented—in AI-generated answers. That includes results from Google’s AI Overviews, and AI assistants like ChatGPT, and Gemini. The goal is to make sure your brand shows up when AI tools answer user questions, even if no

It started with a $100,000 donation, ended with $11 million raised for charity, and somewhere along the way, an electric bike brand earned 235M+ impressions and $7M worth of brand awareness.  Ahrefs’ Community Manager, Michelle Lindner, shared Ryan Trahan’s “50 States Challenge” in our #Marketing Slack channel after watching it with her kids. She thought

In a dataset of 15,000 prompts, we found that—on average—only 12% of links cited by ChatGPT, Gemini, and Copilot appear in Google’s top 10 results for the same prompt. Perplexity is the outlier: nearly 1 in 3 of its citations point to pages that rank in the top 10 for the target query. We analyzed

First, we had “the great decoupling”, now we’re seeing “the great diversification”. Brands are overhauling their strategies since losing clicks to Google.  You’ve probably heard that Google’s AI search features are tanking organic traffic. In April, we reported that click-through rates dropped by 35% across 300,000 keywords. Now, a Pew Research study has revealed that

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