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 introduces Chrome Auto Browse, a powerful agentic experience that handles multi-step chores on your behalf.
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Yahoo launches Yahoo Scout, an AI-powered answer engine.
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Google introduces Google-Extended, a new control that lets websites manage how their content is used to train their Gemini models.
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Best of the week
How to Track AI Overviews: Mentions, Citations, Click Loss, and the Traffic Google Won’t Show You: Tracking AIOs can be a minefield because Google keeps AI Overview data under lock and key. Here’s how you can do it using tools, workarounds, and even a bit of vibecoding.
How to Choose the Best Prompts to Monitor Your AI Search Visibility:
Now that Ahrefs users can track AI visibility for the exact queries they care about, many people are wondering which terms they should monitor. Here's our framework.
Update: AI Overviews Reduce Clicks by 58%: We re-ran our study and voila, clicks are even more reduced.
Debunking The Myth That Search Is Dying: SEO traffic is down slightly (-2.5%), not dramatically. And traffic to search engines increased from 2019 to 2020 (+6.9%), decreased slightly in 2022 (-1.5%), and has been relatively flat since 2023 (-1.0%). In fact, traffic has increased slightly in 2025 to both Google (+0.8%) and search engines as a whole (+0.4%). Further, visitors to Google increased by +1.4% comparing Q4 2025 vs. 2024.
Is Google Finally Cracking Down on Self-Promotional Listicles?: New data suggests that shortcut may be contributing to performance declines in SEO.
GSC Data is 75% Incomplete: Kevin Indig’s analysis of 450M impressions showed that Google filters 3/4 of our data.
[Video] Reddit for AI Agents: Moltbook, the social network for AI agents is going viral. How is it going? And where will it end up? (Watch the follow-up video too.)
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Latest from our podcast
This week’s podcast guest is Ethan Smith, CEO of Graphite. Here’s what we covered:
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Why AI isn’t actually killing the web
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Measuring the real traffic drop
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The winners and losers of the AI traffic shift
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How AI behaviors are expanding the "Search Pie"
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Cleaning up outdated and inaccurate citations
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Why SEO and AEO are the same thing
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Why your AI tracking is biased
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Mining sales calls and Reddit for high-intent prompts
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How to win the RAG citation game
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Why being #15 in citations is better than #15 in Google
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ChatGPT vs. Gemini vs. Perplexity: Where to focus first?
Listen to the full episode on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts.
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Latest from our YouTube
I Outsourced our Digital Marketing to AI. Here's What Happened
In this video, Sam takes a real B2B Digital Marketing workflow and hand it to AI to see if he could get 80 percent publish ready with minimal human touch.
See you next week,
Si Quan
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