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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Best of the week
What Is an MCP Server, and Why Should Marketers Care?: What if checking competitor rankings, pulling analytics, and creating reports took one prompt instead of three tools? MCP makes it possible.
Short vs. Long Content in AI Overviews: The Data Says Both Work: We studied 174,000 pages cited in AI Overview responses to see what actually matters. There’s almost no correlation between word length and being cited in AI Overviews.
Do Self-Promotional “Best” Lists Boost ChatGPT Visibility? Study of 26,283 Source URLs: All of the data points to a clear answer: Agencies and SaaS companies should publish self-promotional “best” lists. However, as Wil Reynolds says, “Any marketer worth a damn knows listing yourself at the top of a list hosted on your site doesn’t build trust with buyers.”
10 ChatGPT SEO Tools That Help You Rank Higher: Plug them straight into your workflow.
I Ran an AI Misinformation Experiment. Every Marketer Should See the Results: Mateusz invented a fake luxury paperweight company, spread three made-up stories about it online, and watched AI tools confidently repeat the lies. We live in a scary world.
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Latest from our podcast
This week’s podcast guest is Bruno Estrella, Head of Marketing at Clay. Here’s what we covered:
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Inventing the "GTM Engineer" role, and why it went viral.
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How they scaled to ~200 events a year by letting the community run them.
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Why they refuse to hire ad agencies for their OOH campaigns.
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Why sending traffic to low-conversion pages is actually a smart move.
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How to hire "obsessive" marketers who aren't even looking for a job.
Listen to the full episode on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts.
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Latest from our YouTube
The Google Update That's Changing SEO (and No One Noticed)
A strange Google update happened around November 3 and it’s spiking searches for products across the board. It all points to one thing that’s changing SEO: AI Overviews. In this video, we break down what changed, why it matters, and how SEOs and brands can get ahead of it before everyone else catches on.
See you next week,
Si Quan
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