We’re excited to announce our first ever global conference, Ahrefs Evolve 2024, in Singapore!

Join us for a 2-day conference packed with insights from 18 industry leaders on the latest SEO and digital marketing trends.

Early bird prices are available until 1st August, so get your ticket fast!

📰 News & updates

Google AI Overviews under fire for giving dangerous and wrong answers: Google’s AI fails have gone viral. Its AI Overviews recommended users to run with scissors, cook with glue and eat rocks.

Google Lens and Circle to Search gains more links, facts and AI Overviews: Not only are the search results more graphical, they have richer information for these more interactive ways of searching.

🔝 SEO

How to charge thousands for SEO consulting: In this new episode of Ahrefs’ Podcast, Eli Schwartz shares why he decided to launch a solo consultancy, how to charge more, where to find clients, what it's like to create a new SEO concept (product-led SEO) and write a book about it, and why Google is afraid to fully release SGE.

Everyone in SEO should see these leaked Google Search API documents: Someone shared with Rand more than 2,500 pages of API documentation containing 14,014 attributes (API features) that appear to come from Google’s internal “Content API Warehouse.” Rand also took further steps to verify that these documents were legit. Here are Rand’s takeaways:

1. Google appears to have ways to filter out clicks they don’t want to count in their ranking systems, and include ones they do. They also seem to measure length of clicks.
2. Google uses Chrome to generate clickstream data.
3. Google uses whitelists for sensitive topics like travel, COVID, and politics
4. Scores and data generated by EWOK’s quality raters may be directly involved in Google’s search system, rather than simply a training set for experiments.
5. Google uses click data to determine how to weight links in rankings.

Google Search’s internal engineering documentation has leaked: Mike King has also done a deep dive into the leaked documents and shared his findings. Some quick takeaways: 1) Yes, Google uses clicks, and 2) yes, looks like there is a Google sandbox. For the rest, grab a tumbler of coffee and take your time to sift through the article.

Google documents leaked and SEOs are making some wild assumptions: The problem with the SEO industry—everyone will take a tiny grain of something and turn it into some larger truth. Patrick sets the record straight.

AI Overviews SEO impact report: For Siege Media’s clients, they’ve seen an increase in impressions, average clickthrough rate (CTR), and total traffic since the overviews went live.



Is Reddit taking over local SERPs?: 'Informational' local searches generate Reddit results 81% of the time. And Reddit results appear for 16% of 'transactional' local searches.

The myth of manufacturing author E-E-A-T: The harsh reality is that most people will never achieve true author-level E-E-A-T. Doing so takes personal motivation from the author, ongoing dedication to a topic to the level where you become a subject matter expert, and maintaining that reputation. Brands cannot easily manufacture such a reputation for their authors at scale without the author’s involvement and personal investment.

💻 Digital marketing

The Best of Ahrefs’ Digest: May 2024: ICYMI, these are my favorite articles from the Digest in May 2024.

[Book] Shoemaker: The founding story of Reebok. Also a story of grit and perseverance. Joe made Reebok popular in the UK, but despite his best efforts, he wasn’t the person who made Reebok global. That was Paul Fireman; Joe sold the business to Paul in 1984 and that’s when it boomed and went international. But that’s not to say Joe isn’t a good entrepreneur; he is. After all, one can also argue that’s the hallmark of being a good entrepreneur—knowing when to step aside and let someone take the reins.

Till next time ;)
Cheers,