Ahrefs’ Digest #198: “Humanizing AI content”, Reddit marketing, and more

Welcome to another edition of the Ahrefs’ Digest.

Here’s our meme of the week:

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Quick SEO news

• Google quietly rolled out a new bot for commercial AI customers and documentation for site owners to track its visits.

• Google's John Mueller confirms core updates impact the AI Overviews.

• Google may now use OG titles for title links.

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Best of the week

5 Restaurant SEO Tips Backed by Diners & Data: The key to restaurant SEO is understanding that most people don’t search for specific restaurants. They search for the type of cuisine or dish they want to eat. Getting diners through the door is a game of ranking well for these types of queries.

The Sleazy World of Reddit Marketing, Everything is Fake: Google’s promotion of Reddit in their search results has led to insane ways people are spamming the “front page of the Internet.” Lars Lofgren exposes their tactics.

So You’ve Been Asked To “Humanize” AI Content: Humanizing AI content is a doomed effort from the start. The whole point of using AI is to drive speed, scale, and efficiency; getting humans to edit, and essentially rewrite, long-form AI prose completely undermines that value proposition. By the time you’ve researched and added in the “rich” human element, you may as well have created the content from scratch yourself.

SEOzempic: Google has changed how it treats domains, starting around October 2023. Before the change, Google indexed everything and prioritized the highest-quality content on a domain. Now, a domain and its content need to prove themselves before Google even tries to dig for gold. If the domain has too much low-quality content, Google might index only some pages or none at all in extreme cases.

Travel SEO: 8 Strategies From Actual Travel Publishers and SEOs: To write this guide on travel SEO, I interviewed seven experienced travel SEOs. Here are the tactics you can use to outcompete larger travel brands and even Google itself.

See you next week,
Si Quan

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