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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Google is rolling out the December 2025 core update.
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Google introduces social channels in Search Console.
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Google launches Preferred Sources globally. Preferred Sources in Search lets you customize Top Stories to see more from your favorite outlets and sites.
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Google also announces that they’re increasing the number of inline links in AI Mode.
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Best of the week
Top Brand Visibility Factors in ChatGPT, AI Mode, and AI Overviews (75k Brands Studied): YouTube mentions show the strongest correlation with AI visibility (~0.737), outperforming every other factor across ChatGPT, AI Mode, and AI Overviews. And Branded web mentions still correlate highly with AI visibility (0.66–0.71).
Are AI Mode and AI Overviews Just Different Versions of the Same Answer? (730K Responses Studied): AI Mode and AI Overviews reach very similar conclusions (86% semantic similarity) while citing different sources (only 13.7% citation overlap).
How LLMs and RAG Systems Retrieve, Rank, and Cite Content: A technical guide to understanding retrieval-augmented generation architecture and its implications for content visibility in generative search.
How AI Broke Search Trust and What Google Is Doing About It (Maybe): Gianluca Fiorelli riffs on Mateusz’s fake brand experiment with his own thoughts. His takeaway: in a world of unlimited content, authenticity, verified identity, and genuine user demand are the only assets that can’t be faked.
See you next week,
Si Quan
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