The Ahrefs community is full of builders doing interesting things and we want to start sharing those stories.
We're featuring the people behind the sites, agencies, and businesses in SEO and digital marketing.
If that’s you, fill out the form here or share this with a friend/colleague.
Here's our meme of the week:
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Quick search marketing news
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Best of the week
10 SEO Trends I’ve Seen Firsthand in 2026 (With Data): Google’s AI Overviews are swallowing clicks, with our data showing a 58% drop in traffic for top results. To survive, SEOs are shifting from simple keyword targeting to "query fan-out" and topic clusters. If you aren't optimizing for conversational AI and fragmenting attention, you're losing traffic.
What is a Good Organic CTR? Real Website Benchmarks (June 2026): We studied 400,000 websites and found that a typical organic CTR is actually between 1% and 2%. Authority is a massive factor here, as sites with a DR over 90 see 6x more clicks than newer sites. In the age of AI Overviews, realize that a sub-1% CTR is often the new norm.
Average Organic Traffic Benchmarks From Real Websites (June 2026): Benchmarks provide a concrete growth target, but the "right" number is unique to your specific strategy. Data from 400,000 sites shows that industry matters, but authority and site size are the real drivers of exponential traffic growth. Don't compare yourself to the mean-level outliers; the median is your true metric for success.
The Backlink API I Use to Track New Links to 180+ Brands: Ahrefs opened up its API to all paid plans, making massive-scale competitor monitoring affordable for everyone. Checking new links across 180 brands costs less than the monthly unit limit on a basic plan. Use these insights to automate PR opportunities and spot content trends on autopilot.
How to Start Building Your Own Marketing Tools With AI (the Only Beginner's Guide.): Building your own marketing tools doesn't require a computer science degree. If you can spot a tedious task, you can use AI to automate it. Start by picking a model like Claude or Gemini, setting up a code editor, and shipping small experiments to find what works.
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Latest from our podcast
This week’s podcast guest is Professor Byron Sharp, the Director of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science at the University of South Australia, and the author of "How Brands Grow," one of the most influential marketing books ever written.
In this conversation, you'll discover why marketing funnels are "nonsense," why differentiation is overrated, and how mental availability trumps everything else. Professor Sharp explains why 95% of your potential customers aren't ready to buy right now—and what that means for your marketing strategy.
Listen to the full episode on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts.
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Latest from our YouTube
6 months after the Xarumei experiment: Insights for Brands in AI Search
The Xarumei experiment proves that brands can successfully "hallucinate" themselves into AI results through persistent mentions across high authority platforms. If you want LLMs to recommend you, stop obsessing over SEO tags. Focus on seeding your brand name where AI scrapers actually look.
Automate your marketing with AI Agents
The era of generic AI chat is over. This workshop shows you how to build autonomous agents that actually execute marketing tasks rather than just talking about them. If you want to move past basic prompting and start scaling your operations, this is the roadmap you need.
See you next week,
Si Quan
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