Welcome to a new edition of the Ahrefs’ Digest.
Here's our meme of the week:
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Quick search marketing news
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Best of the week
Best PPC Tools: My 9 Top Picks Under $300: These tools cover everything from automation, keyword research to click fraud prevention and landing page building.
The State of SEO in 2025: Anything Glen publishes, I read. This time round, he shares 34 insights based on what he’s seeing in the SEO industry.
15 AEO Tools That Will Help You Optimize for LLMs: If you successfully optimize your way into AI responses, you’ll lead what is becoming a massive adoption curve. These tools can help you get there.
LLMO Is in Its Black Hat Era: When SEO became a race to the bottom, we lost trust, quality, and creativity. Let’s not do it again with LLMs.
Do Higher Content Scores Mean Higher Google Rankings? We Studied It (So You Don’t Have To): The higher your content score, the higher you rank. Is that true? I analyzed five tools to find out.
My 3-Year $200,000++ Google Helpful Content Recovery Journey Is A Quiet Warning For News Publishers Everywhere: “What if the truth is harder to swallow? What if there were never a way to recover from Google’s Helpful Content (HCU) updates? What if the game was unwinnable from the start, and we’ve all just been flogging a dead horse?”
Google Made It So You Can’t Track Clicks From AI Mode: Clicks to links in AI mode are not being recorded at all in Google Search Console, and they’re not sending a referrer value when you click. They’re treated as Unknown or Direct, depending on your analytics system.
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Latest from our podcast
This week’s podcast guest is Gael Breton, founder of Authority Hacker. Here’s what we covered:
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How to write newsletters 2x faster without sacrificing quality
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Using AI tools to prep for podcast interviews 5x quicker
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Repurposing long-form videos into Shorts with 0 manual work
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What makes AI content valuable (vs what makes it spam)
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Why you should treat AI like a "calculator for text"
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How AI agents + SEO tools might change the game
Listen to the full episode on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts.
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Latest from our YouTube
17 Years of Brutally Honest SEO Advice
If you’ve been struggling to rank on Google, this is the video you didn’t know you needed. After 17 years in the trenches, we’re laying out the brutally honest truths about SEO that most “experts” won’t talk about – from Google’s real incentives to the silent killers that hold your site back.
We’ll unpack the hard realities of why some content never ranks, how to rethink keyword targeting, and the subtle shifts that separate traffic from traction. You’ll see what’s broken in most SEO advice today, and how to course-correct with strategies that are actually tied to business growth - not just rankings.
See you next week,
Si Quan
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