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 adds subscription labels, inline links, and desktop link previews to its AI search experiences.
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Microsoft and OpenAI renegotiate their partnership to allow OpenAI to use rival cloud services while Microsoft maintains a revenue share.
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Amazon joins Google’s Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP) to enable AI agents to access standardized product and checkout data.
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Google shuts down its Project Mariner experiment, folding the technology into Gemini Agent and AI Mode.
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Google integrates Gemini directly into the Chrome browser as part of a new feature rollout.
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Anthropic partners with SpaceX to increase compute capacity and raise usage limits for Claude Code and the Claude API.
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Best of the week
AI Keyword Research: How It Works and 9 Prompts to Start: AI keyword research is great for the grunt work, but keep in mind that chatbots often hallucinate SEO data. If you aren't connecting your AI to a live database, you're just guessing. Use it to cluster intent or brainstorm angles, but verify the numbers first.
Agentic AI vs. Generative AI: What’s the Difference, and Why Does It Matter?: Generative AI is a reactive coworker that only answers when prompted. Agentic AI is an autonomous partner that plans, uses tools, and completes entire workflows while you walk away. If you want to stop prompting and start doing, the shift to agency is how you actually scale marketing.
What 34 Studies Reveal About AI Search in 2026 : The 25% "search death" prediction was a total miss—traffic only dipped 2.5%. People aren't leaving search; they're using AI to start journeys and Google to finish them. If you want AI to cite you, forget the top 10 rankings and focus on your ecosystem on Reddit and YouTube.
The Best of Published Decks From BrightonSEO UK - April 2026: BrightonSEO just wrapped up, and the slide decks are already hitting the web. Whether you missed the trip or couldn't clone yourself to see every session, these presentations cover everything from AI search KPIs to technical migration traps. Grab the insights while they're fresh.
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Latest from our podcast
This week’s podcast guest is Ryan Law, our Director of Content Marketing.
Ryan has spent years refining AI-powered content workflows. He's built an intricate system of 23+ AI "skills" that work together to research, outline, draft, and optimize blog content — all while maintaining the Ahrefs voice and incorporating product use cases naturally.
In this episode, you'll discover exactly how Ryan's "blog pipeline" works, why breaking content creation into discrete steps produces better results, and how AI eliminates the drudgery of writing while preserving human creativity. Tim also shares his own AI workflow for writing his upcoming book through voice dictation.
Listen to the full episode on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts.
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Latest from our YouTube
Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) Course by Ahrefs: What is AEO?
We're starting a new AEO course on YouTube. Follow along our free AI SEO course that'll teach you AEO (aka GEO), the discipline of optimizing your brand and content for AI search engines.
See you next week,
Si Quan
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