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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Public content from professional Instagram accounts will automatically become searchable through Google.
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Google rolls out AI mode to everyone in India.
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OpenAI quietly adds Shopify as a shopping search partner.
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Google Search Console now shows a new filter for "Discussion forums".
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Google Discover adds AI summaries.
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Best of the week
6 Content Marketing Conferences to Attend in 2025: You should definitely be attending Ahrefs Evolve in San Diego, California!
AI Overviews Cite AI-Generated Content More Than Human Writing: Only 8.6% of the cited pages in AI Overviews were “purely human”. The rest were pure AI or assisted with AI.
The High Cost of Hidden Search Terms: How Google Skims Profit from Advertisers: For every dollar that you spend on Google Ads, they skim almost a dollar in forced inefficiency through hidden search terms.
3 Human Skills That Make You Irreplaceable in an AI World: Everyone is constantly asking themselves, “Will AI replace me?” It’s exhausting, depressing, and counterproductive. But there’s a simpler, and more useful, question to ask: “What would make me irreplaceable?”
In the AI Age, Making Things Difficult Is Deliberate: “We should use automation to take away mundane obstacles and drudgery. I do. But we must recognize the distinction between that and what I call productive friction. This is the kind of difficulty that’s worth preserving, the kind of struggle that pushes you forward as you push against it. [...] In a world rushing to remove the struggle, it reminds me that friction was never the enemy. It was always the teacher.”
Study: SearchGPT (Quietly) Abandons Bing and Moves to Google: 9 out of 10 pages retrieved by SearchGPT from an external search engine are found among the first results of Google.
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Latest from our podcast
This week’s podcast guest is Chris Cunningham, founding member and Head of Social Marketing at ClickUp. Here’s what we covered:
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How to measure the ROI of viral TikTok videos
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Why every B2B company should hire a full-time creator
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What kinds of content brands should post on social
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Does humor belong in the world of big business?
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Where (and how) to hire talented actors for your videos
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How Chris structures his team to write, shoot, and produce viral content
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How they got 1M plays on a $15K investment by releasing a music album on Spotify
Listen to the full episode on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts.
See you next week,
Si Quan
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