Welcome to a new edition of the Ahrefs’ Digest.
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Moving on, here’s our meme of the week:
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Quick search marketing news
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Google releases AI Mode to more European countries (Spain, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands, Portugal, Poland, Switzerland, Ireland but not France yet), Australia, and 40 new countries and in 35 languages.
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OpenAI releases Instant Checkout and the Agentic Commerce Protocol.
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Google is now testing an AI Overview style meta description.
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Microsoft launches a new Bing Places for Businesses.
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Best of the week
The 11 Best Marketing Insights from the Ahrefs Podcast: At nearly 100 hours of content, you’d missed or forgotten insights, even if you’re our most loyal fan. I went back and rescued the best ones from our guests. (Many of them will be speaking on stage at Ahrefs Evolve too!)
How to Audit Brand Mentions for Modern SEO: Brand mentions are to AI search what backlinks are to traditional SEO. Think of it as backlink auditing for the AI era. Instead of just analyzing links, you’re digging into the narratives and contexts that shape how both search engines and AI models present your brand.
I Asked 20+ Marketers for the Best Marketing Newsletters. Here’s 10 They Recommended: I asked the speakers and panelists at Ahrefs Evolve, our conference in San Diego from October 13-15, which newsletters they actually read and recommend.
The 10 Best Marketing Podcasts (Recommended by Actual Marketers): I also asked the speakers and panelists at Ahrefs Evolve which podcasts they listen to.
I Asked 20+ Marketers for Their Best Marketing Books. Here’s the 15 Books They Recommend: And the final question for our speakers and panelists at Ahrefs Evolve—what books they read.
What Our AI Mode User Behavior Study Reveals about the Future of Search: AI Mode holds attention and keeps users inside, but clicks are rare and mostly transactional.
I Found It in the Code, Science Proved It in the Lab: The Recency Bias That’s Reshaping AI Search: “The researchers took passages from TREC 2021 and 2022 test collections, added fake publication dates (nothing else changed same text, same quality), and watched AI models rerank them. Every single model fell for it.”
See you next week,
Si Quan
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