Ahrefs’ Digest #223: Best AI marketing tools, search demand lifecycle, and more

Welcome to a new edition of the Ahrefs’ Digest.

Here's our meme of the week:

—

Quick search marketing news

• Google loves releasing core updates after I send this newsletter. The latest one is currently rolling out.

• Google has updated its manual actions documentation about site reputation abuse.

• Google tests AI search options beyond AI mode.

—

Best of the week

Education SEO for Higher Education, EdTech and K-12 Schools: Nine experts share a practical roadmap for education SEO, covering different business models, regions, and industry sectors.

14 of the Best AI Marketing Tools We’ve Tried & Spied in 2025: Ahrefs Brand Rader, Browse AI, NapkinAI, Gumloop—here are the ones we have our eye on in 2025.

The 7 Phases of the Search Demand Lifecycle: Going Beyond Search Volume: Every keyword follows a lifecycle moving through 7 distinct phases. Understand these phases and spot emerging opportunities before your competitors do.

Revealed: The Exact Search Result Data Sent to Google’s AI: Dan Petrovic found a way to intercept the key step in Gemini’s RAG pipeline to reveal what SERP data is provided to Google’s AI model. Mindblown.

New Research: Google Search Grew 20%+ in 2024; receives ~373X more searches than ChatGPT: No, Google is not dying.

What Content Works Well in LLMS?: Key takeaways:

• Classic SEO metrics don't strongly influence AI Chatbot citations

• Content depth (higher word and sentence counts) and readability (good Flesch Score) matter more

• Different AI Chatbots have distinct preferences - monitoring multiple platforms is important

• Brand popularity (measured by search volume) is the strongest predictor of brand mentions in AI Chatbots, especially in ChatGPT

• Prompt structure influences brand visibility and we don’t yet know how user phrase prompts

• Technical issues can sabotage AI visibility - ensure your site isn't accidentally blocking LLM crawlers through robots.txt or CDN settings

Building Bridges With the C-suite: 7 Marketing Leaders Share How to Earn Content a Seat at the Table: Your C-suite don’t understand how content fits into the big picture, can’t understand why results take so long, or hesitate to dedicate more budget to it. The onus is on you to help them get content. You can’t solve this overnight, but these are just a few ideas to get the ball rolling. 

AI Mode Ranks Sites Differently Than Traditional Search. It Uses a “Query Fan-Out” Technique: Marie Haynes thinks AI mode will likely replace traditional search. That means we’ll need to do a lot of testing and analysis to figure out how to optimize for it.

See you next week,
Si Quan

P.S. Liked this week’s Digest? Forward it to a friend or tell them to subscribe here.