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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Anthropic launches Claude Sonnet 5, a new "agentic" model capable of autonomous web browsing and tool execution.
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Google completes the rollout of its June 2026 Spam Update after two days of widespread ranking volatility.
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Cloudflare introduces the Attribution Business Insights dashboard to help site owners track AI crawler behavior and value.
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OpenAI previews GPT-5.6 Sol, a next-generation model featuring enhanced reasoning and safety protocols.
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Cloudflare opens the waitlist for its Monetization Gateway, enabling site owners to charge AI agents for accessing content and tools.
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Best of the week
Keeping Data-Driven Content Fresh Was a Monthly Slog. So We Taught an Agent to Do It.: Data-driven content is a massive traffic driver, but keeping the numbers fresh is a monthly slog. We finally stopped wasting 20 hours a month on manual updates by building an AI agent to handle the data pulling and formatting. It's the perfect way to automate the drudgery while keeping humans in control of the final quality check.
How to Use Reddit for SEO (The Right Way): Reddit is effectively the internet's new focus group and a massive visibility engine for Google and AI. To win here, stop treating it like a billboard and start contributing as a human. Claim your brand space, mine subreddits for raw customer language, and build genuine karma before you need it.
How 27 Companies Use AI to Grow Traffic & Revenue: Smart companies aren't using AI to replace their marketing. They're using it to automate the boring stuff. From Opendoor saving $500K on email systems to Beehiiv’s CEO cutting his newsletter workload by 90 percent, the goal is efficiency. Use it to find your edge, then get back to the work only humans can do.
Only 27% of Domain Migrations Recover in 90 Days: Don't let anyone tell you domain migrations are seamless. New data from SALT.agency shows it takes a median of 304 days to recover your traffic. Only 27% of sites bounce back within three months, so prepare your stakeholders for a long wait.
How ChatGPT Actually Picks Sources (I Read the Network Traffic, Not the Outputs): Suganthan’s analysis of ChatGPT’s network traffic reveals four internal content labels: `serp`, `labrador`, `bright`, and `oxylabs`. While "labrador" appears to be a licensed tier for major publishers, the bulk of web fetching relies on commercial scrapers Bright Data and Oxylabs. This "peek under the hood" proves that visibility often depends more on scraping vendors than traditional SEO.
Translated Reddit is Winning AI Citations: Google is citing machine-translated Reddit pages at an industrial scale to answer AI queries in non-English markets. While ChatGPT largely ignores these translations, Google’s AI Overviews are leaning on them to dominate commercial searches in countries like Germany. Your local content now competes with every Reddit thread ever written.
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Latest from our YouTube
Google Crushed Affiliate Websites. His Grew Anyway.
While others sank during recent Google updates, iRunFar grew by 249% through the "Attention Dividend." Bryon Powell’s success proves that survival in affiliate marketing requires a genuine moat based on first-hand expertise. Stop chasing algorithms and start building a brand that actually earns reader trust.
See you next week,
Si Quan
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