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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SparkToro finds that over 20% of Americans are heavy users of AI tools, but 95% of Americans still use traditional search engines, and 86% are heavy users.
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Google launches embedded link carousels in AI Mode responses on desktop, with mobile coming soon.
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Best of the week
New Study: How Often Do AI Assistants Hallucinate Links? (16 Million URLs Studied): We found that AI assistants send visitors to 404 pages 2.87x more often than Google Search. ChatGPT is the greatest offender, with 1.01% of clicked URLs and 2.38% of all cited URLs returning a 404 status (compared to baseline 404 rates of 0.15% and 0.84% respectively).
ChatGPT May Scrape Google, but the Results Don’t Match: Based on three different studies we conducted, our conclusion is that ChatGPT (and similar systems) don’t just lift URLs directly from Google, Bing, or other indexes. Instead, they apply additional processing steps before citing sources.
100 Most Cited Domains in Google’s AI Mode: The top 5 most cited domains in Google's AI Mode are Wikipedia, YouTube, Google’s blog, Reddit, and Google.
Answer Engine Optimization: How to Win in AI-Powered Search: SEO is still essential for brands to show up in these answers, but visibility now depends on more than rankings. What matters is whether your brand and content are trusted and structured enough to be mentioned or cited. This is where answer engine optimization comes in.
Google AI Mode: All You Need to Know: It seems like Google is going all-in on AI Mode, rolling it out to 180++ countries and territories. Here’s everything we know about AI Mode to date.
81 AI SEO Statistics for 2025 (Fresh and Original Data): This post is for you if you’re a business stakeholder, journalist, researcher, or marketer looking for up-to-date data on how AI is changing search so you can stay ahead of the game.
What We Actually Know About Optimizing for LLM Search: If you want any chance of visibility in LLM search, you need to understand how to make your brand visible in AI answers. Here is what we do know so far, based on ongoing research and experimentation.
SEO Has Been Tactical for 20 Years. GenAI Forces the Strategy Question: “For two decades, SEO has been defined by tactical output. Executives set the strategy (“We need organic growth”) and SEO was tasked with delivering through audits, fixes, optimizations, and publishing. Generative AI changes that equation. Machines are absorbing tactical SEO tasks. That doesn’t eliminate SEO. It elevates it. If tactical execution is becoming commoditized, the value shifts to strategy."
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Latest from our YouTube
How to Diagnose Website Traffic Drops in the AI Era (2025)
Sudden traffic drops are every marketers' nightmare. But here's the good news: Every traffic drop is diagnosable. In this video, you’ll learn:
See you next week,
Si Quan
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