Welcome to a new edition of the Ahrefs’ Digest.
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Moving on to our meme of the week:
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Quick search marketing news
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Google makes it easier to protect your personal information on their search results.
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Google introduces a new series about robots.txt.
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OpenAI announces GPT-4.5.
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Anthropic announces Claude Sonnet 3.7.
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Tencent releases Hunyuan Turbo S.
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Pinterest is being strangled by AI slop.
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Best of the week
SEO Is the Worst It’s Ever Been (And It’s Still Your Best Marketing Channel): “Here are two ideas that can be true at the same time: SEO offers worse returns than it used to. SEO is still one of the best marketing channels.”
Beyond Rank Tracking: Analyzing Brand Perceptions Through Language Model Association Networks: Dan Petrovic offers a structured approach to analyzing brand perception using LLMs.
The Top 50 Ecommerce Startups by Search Growth (Q1 2025): We’ve analyzed 150K websites to find out which ecommerce startups have seen substantial search growth this year. Top names include Thatch, Elmut, Wrogn, Virgio, and Bezel.
What Sources Do AI Search Engines Cite? Analysis of 40k Responses and 250k Sources: Earned (third‐party, editorial, or affiliate) remains the most frequent type of citations across ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity.
17 Proven SaaS Marketing Strategies From 11 CMOs & Founders: Over the past year, we interviewed top SaaS founders and marketing executives on the Ahrefs Podcast. We asked them about strategies that helped them scale. From Crypto.com to Airwallex, Paddle, and Surfer, these battle-tested methods have fueled growth in competitive markets with limited resources.
How To Create (Actually Useful) Custom GPTs for Marketing Automation: See how Seer creates custom GPTs to scale routine tasks (so that their experts can spend more time on higher-level strategic insights.)
See you next week,
Si Quan
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