Welcome to a new edition of the Ahrefs’ Digest.
Our second-ever conference–Ahrefs Evolve–will be in San Diego, California this coming October 14 and 15!
We're getting some of the best minds in marketing to speak at Evolve. People like:
- Chris Cunningham, Head of Social Marketing @ ClickUp and one of its four who started the company. He built ClickUp’s content into the best in B2B SaaS, surpassing 1 billion impressions in 2024.
- Bryan Casey - Vice President, Digital @ IBM, leading their inbound marketing programs which includes a team of journalists, technical creators, a/v production and channel strategists across areas including search, newsletters & podcasting.
- Sophie Brannon - Co-Founder & Director of StudioHawk. With over a decade of SEO experience spanning agency, in-house, and consultancy roles, she has worked across a wide range of industries including eCommerce, finance, gaming, health, and SaaS.
Early bird pricing will end on July 31st, so get your tickets before that!
Alright, moving on, here's our meme of the week:
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Quick search marketing news
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The June 2025 core update has finished rolling out.
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OpenAI releases ChatGPT Agent.
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Google homepage search box rolls out AI Mode button.
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More than 4,000 fake news websites powered by generative AI have been set up to game Google Discover and search, according to award-winning French journalist Jean-Marc Manach.
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Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears in the results.
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Best of the week
9 Digital Marketing Conferences We’re Attending in 2025: You should definitely be attending Ahrefs Evolve in San Diego, California!
Google Thinks AI Mode Is Good for Users, but the Content Isn’t Good Enough to Rank in Google: Patrick set up some tests over a month ago to see if Google would rank content generated by Google AI Mode in the organic search results. Spoiler: it did not rank.
8.64% of AI Overviews Appear Outside Position #1 (And as Low as Position #6): From our study of 10M SERPs.
76% of AI Overview Citations Pull From Top 10 Pages: 9.50% of AI Overview-cited pages rank between position 11-100 and 14.40% of pages cited in AI Overviews do not rank in the SERPs (i.e. rank below position 100).
Does Ranking Higher on Google Mean You’ll Get Cited in AI Overviews?: Yes, SEO still matters.
Goodbye, Featured Snippets: How SERP Features Have Evolved in the AI Era: Shopping, Featured Snippet, Paid Sitelink, and Paid SERP features saw the greatest relative decline. Of these, Featured snippets are the most significant, appearing on 5.53% of SERPs in June, down from 15.41% in January.
What We Learned From Studying Our Own “AI Proof” Keywords: By “AI proof keywords” we mean queries that keep (or increase) their clicks, even when AI Overviews are present in the SERP. The keywords we found fell into 3 categories: free tools; they didn’t rank originally; and they appeared in SERPs where AI Overviews ranked below position one.
Is RRF the Secret to Dominating AI Citations? I Decoded ChatGPT’s Ranking Formula: RRF isn’t new – it’s been around since 2009 and is widely used in information retrieval. It’s a method to combine search results from multiple queries into one final ranking. The formula is straightforward: RRF score = 1/(60 + rank position).
ChatGPT Plus Is Secretly Google-Powered - My “Hidden Page” Experiment Proves It: A Reddit user ran an experiment and discovered that ChatGPT uses Google Search. Tl;dr: As my study shows, SEO and AEO converges.
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Latest from our YouTube
Give Me 8 Minutes and You'll Crush SEO in 2025
In this video, you'll learn the best SEO tips that will change the way you do SEO in the AI era.
This isn't another list of recycled SEO tips. You'll discover timeless, AI-proof tactics that actually work today and will keep working. We'll break down real-world examples of how they work in action so you can apply them to your site.
See you next week,
Si Quan
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