How much will SEO transform in the next couple of years? Will “ten blue links” survive, or are we fully moving into “AI search”? And what do you do with all the SEO knowledge you’ve built over the years?
If these are the questions keeping you up at night, you need to join us at Ahrefs Evolve in San Diego this October.
Get your tickets here
Here's our meme of the week:
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Quick search marketing news
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Google launches Gemini in Chrome.
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AI Mode is now directly available from the Chrome address bar in the U.S.
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Google rolls out AI Mode in Spanish.
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The August 2025 Spam Update is finally done.
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Google Discover adds social media posts & follow buttons.
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Best of the week
LLM Visibility: What It Is and How to Optimize for It: If your brand isn’t appearing in these AI responses, you’re becoming invisible to an increasingly important segment of your audience.
UX and SEO: A Guide for Winning the Searcher, Not Just the SERP: User interactions, also called UX signals or user signals, include things like clicks, scrolls, swipes, and mouse hovers. These now play a major role in how Google ranks content and which brands gain more visibility in search results.
I Wouldn’t Hire a Content Engineer, and You Shouldn’t Either: A content engineer is an AI-native content role with a focus on systems thinking, using AI to scale content output and increase quality. But Ryan thinks this role is almost diametrically opposed to the skills and abilities he believes we need.
AI-Generated Content 101 for Marketers and Creators: Best practices, top tool recommendations, crucial consumer data, and all the platform-specific rules you need to know.
The 50 Best PR Pitching Opportunities in ChatGPT: We analyzed our Brand Radar database of 9.6 million ChatGPT queries to find the most visible, pitch-worthy publishers in ChatGPT responses. Pitching these outlets means your brand gets in front of readers, circulates on social media, ranks in search, and now resurfaces in AI.
Why Language Models Hallucinate: OpenAI’s new research paper argues that language models hallucinate because standard training and evaluation procedures reward guessing over acknowledging uncertainty.
What If All Media is Marketing?: “Today, content is the product and one way it monetizes is by renting out the attention it generates—selling advertising. In this new model, content is the cost and the only sustainable profits will be for media companies to own the complements themselves. As this continues to play out, media companies will have to re-orient their businesses. What used to be called “ancillary” sales will now be primary. Fandoms, communities, franchises, merchandise, and live experiences will be the economic engines, not the content itself.”
See you next week,
Si Quan
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