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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Reddit sues Perplexity for scraping data to train their AI systems.
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Google Voice Search is now powered by their new Speech-to-Retrieval engine, which gets answers straight from your spoken query without having to convert it to text first.
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Best of the week
How Managers Build (or Break) Their Team’s Self-Confidence: “Managers are usually trying to help, but the impact can be the opposite. Before labeling someone as an underperformer, it’s worth asking: do they actually lack the skills, or do they just lack the confidence?”
Third-Party Sources Drive 85% of Brand Discovery: “Brands are 6.5x more likely to be cited through third-party sources than their own domains.”
The Story of Codesmith: How a Competitor Crippled a $23.5M Bootcamp By Becoming a Reddit Moderator: Incredible investigation. But a horrifying story. We’re all excited to game Reddit for AI SEO, but know that it can also backfire and come crashing down on you.
The Best of Published Decks from the Latest BrightonSEO [October 2025]: What it says on the tin. The best slide decks from the recent BrightonSEO.
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Latest from our podcast
This week’s podcast guest is Ryan Law, our Director of Content Marketing. Here’s what we covered:
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The current state of AI search
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3 ways to influence your AI visibility
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The "Era of Off-Page SEO": Why mentions are the new backlinks
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Optimizing the content types AI prefers to cite
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How to write for AI (and humans)
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Finding and fixing "hallucinated URLs" from AI
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The untapped training data sources LLMs love
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How to perform a content gap analysis for the AI era
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The #1 technical mistake in answer engine optimization
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Fan-out queries: How AI actually searches Google
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The spam strategy you must avoid
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A simple 2-Category framework for AEO
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AI search vs. Google's AI Overviews
Listen to the full episode on YouTube.
See you next week,
Si Quan
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