Welcome to a new edition of the Ahrefs’ Digest.
Here's our meme of the week:
—
Quick search marketing news
-
OpenAI introduces Operator, an agent that can use its own browser to perform tasks for you.
-
Google updated their spam documentation (again) to better define site reputation abuse.
-
Google will no longer show breadcrumbs on mobile search results.
-
Google is introducing AI Overviews to the Circle to Search feature.
—
Best of the week
How to Measure Brand Awareness in 2025 (AKA the Year of the Brand): Here are 11 workflows you can follow to measure the success of your brand awareness.
Google Says “Links Matter Less”—We Looked at 1,000,000 SERPs and Our Data Both Agrees and Disagrees: Google has said links are less important than they used to be, and most SEOs have come to accept that as true. Our findings indicate that this is true overall, but for certain types of queries, links matter more.
State of Digital PR Report (2025): The team at Buzzstream interviewed over 150 digital PR professionals worldwide between November and December 2024.
How Insanely Long Title Tags Help You Rank Better on Google: “Most SEO tools scream at you to keep title tags short, ideally under 60 characters. But we have found that this is advice that you should ignore. I have seen over and over that long title tags, even ones that go over 200 characters, can actually improve rankings.”
My Product Went Viral On Social Media But All I Got Were These Shitty Users: When products go viral, they are invaded by Looky-Loos. Looky-Loos are people who view something for sale with no genuine intention of making a purchase. Remember: Your goal is to scale high-intent users, not the Looky-Loos. If you want product-market fit, you need to consider metrics that generally run over long periods of time.
—
Latest from our YouTube
"No One Visits Page 2 On Google?" Debating Common SEO Myths
Join Cyrus Shepard, Nik Ranger, Patrick Stox, Bernard Huang, Fery Kaszoni, Jason Hennessey, Ryan Law, and Sam Oh as they tackle common misconceptions and reveal what really matters in search engine optimization. From the infamous "No one visits page 2 on Google" claim to the truth behind ranking factors, these SEO experts attempt to separate fact from fiction.
See you next week,
Si Quan
P.S. Liked this week’s Digest? Forward it to a friend or tell them to subscribe here.
