Ahrefs’ Digest #219: AI traffic study, SEO SOPs, and more

Welcome to a new edition of the Ahrefs’ Digest.

Here's our meme of the week:

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Quick search marketing news

• Like OpenAI, Perplexity introduces Deep Research, a new feature that creates in-depth answers using dozens of searches and sources.

• Google updates their structured data to support loyalty programs and pricing.

• Google announced it is testing new pre-fetching methods that increase the speed (Largest Contentful Paint - LCP) of the first two results by 67 milliseconds and for the results after those by about by 9.5 milliseconds.

• YouTube is going to let you put AI-generated video clips in Shorts.

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Best of the week

63% of Websites Receive AI Traffic (New Study of 3,000 Sites): ChatGPT is the biggest referrer, accounting for 50% of AI traffic.

7 SEO SOPs: Your Cheat Code for More Rankings, Less Guesswork: These seven SOPs will make your work faster, smarter, and more effective, from using AI to create quality content to investigating why your traffic suddenly tanked.

8 Content Marketing Trends Shaping 2025 [New Data]: Siege Media and Wynter polled 272 managers and directors in the content marketing and SEO space. Key takeaways:

• There are more big spenders in 2025, with 11.3% of content marketers planning to invest over $45,000 per month in content marketing this year — up from 4.1% in 2024.

• About two-thirds (66.5%) of content marketers aren’t confident about where to allocate their resources.

• Reported traffic is up, with 62.8% of content marketers seeing growth between 2024 and 2025.

• Manual link building is down, with only 21.4% of link builders considering it their main strategy compared to 38.2% in 2024.

Are Stock Prices and Organic Traffic Correlated? I Analyzed 2,000 Public Companies to Find Out: The combined stock prices typically rose along with the total organic traffic they received. Our research showed a strong positive relationship between the market cap weighted standardized price and the total traffic of all Nasdaq stocks used in the study.

Google’s Helpful Content Update Wasn’t About Content Quality—It Was About Site Quality: HCU was a site-wide authority shift. Sites that got hit lost link equity because their backlink sources became weaker. Google didn’t just target bad content—it devalued entire link networks, reducing their power. If your site relied on previously strong links that no longer push rankings, your content took a hit.

How I Boosted Traffic by 72% With Ahrefs’ AI Content Helper: Here’s Louise’s process for using our AI Content Helper to find low-effort, high-reward content updates.

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Latest from our YouTube

Meet The Man Using Google to Steal Customers From Tinder

Meet Scott Valdez, the man who uses Google in a unique way to help people make online dating completely hands-off.

In this interview, Scott shares how he built his multi-million dollar business using Google search to attract clients in an unexpected way. His SEO strategy isn’t just about rankings, it’s about tapping into a hidden demand that most people ignore.

See you next week,
Si Quan

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