Welcome to a new edition of the Ahrefs’ Digest.
Here's our meme of the week:

—
Quick search marketing news
-
Meta acquires AI startup Manus for $2 billion.
-
ICYMI, Google’s December core update has finished rolling out.
—
Best of the week
Fresh Content: Why Publish Dates Make or Break Rankings and AI Visibility: AI assistants cite significantly fresher content than traditional search results.
AI Marketing Examples: 13 Times AI Actually Delivered: AI’s value is removing grunt work and constraints, not replacing the humans who understand your market, your brand, and your customers.
[FREE TOOL] Common Crawl, LLM Training Data, and the Domain Authority Question: Metehan built a free tool to explore Common Crawl’s WebGraph data.
State of AI Search Optimization 2026: Search is shifting from ranked lists to definitive answers. This guide breaks down the retrieval, citation, and trust factors that determine LLM visibility in 2026.
—
Latest from our podcast
This week’s podcast guest is Neville Medhora, the founder of Copywriting Course and SwipeFile.com. Here’s what we covered:
-
The 3 levels of copywriting (and who is safe)
-
Why companies are regretting "All-AI" content
-
The death of "How-To" blogs (and what replaces them)
-
Neville’s "Voice Ramble" workflow for rapid writing
-
Why "Prompt Engineering" is a waste of time
-
Generating custom GIFs with Grok
-
The new #1 skill: Developing "Taste"
-
(Using AI to aggressively repurpose winning ads
-
Speed of ideation: Using AI as your "Junior Employee"
-
The future of the copywriting profession
Listen to the full episode on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts.
—
Latest from our YouTube
How I'd Get Traffic to a New Website if I Had to Start Over (2026)
If Sam had to start over today, here's the exact playbook he'd use to build website traffic to a brand new site, before AI and social siphon all the clicks.
See you next week,
Si Quan
P.S. Liked this week’s Digest? Forward it to a friend or tell them to subscribe here.