In the last 6 months at @Ahrefs, we analyzed over 1 billion data points across 14 studies. Here's what we learned about AI search optimization: 1) "Best X" blog listicles are the single most prominent content format cited by AI chatbots. They make up 43.8% of all page types cited by ChatGPT specifically. 2) 67% of ChatGPT's top 1,000 citations come from sources marketers can't influence: Wikipedia (29.7%), homepages (23.8%), app stores (6.6%). Only 32.3% are influenceable content like educational pages, reviews, news, and blog posts. 3) 28.3% of ChatGPT's most-cited pages have zero Google organic visibility. These pages get cited repeatedly by ChatGPT despite not ranking in Google at all. A completely separate discovery layer. 4) ChatGPT only cites about 50% of the URLs it retrieves. It fetches dozens of pages per query but uses half as background context without attribution. This means that being retrieved and being cited are very different things. 5) Adding schema markup had zero meaningful impact on AI citations. AI Overviews actually dipped −4.6%, while AI Mode ( 2.4%) and ChatGPT ( 2.2%) showed changes indistinguishable from zero. 6) YouTube mentions have the highest correlation (0.737) with AI brand visibility out of all the factors we studied (including all the conventional SEO metrics like backlinks, page count, DR, etc). This held true for both Google-owned and OpenAI products. 7) AI Overviews reduce clicks to the #1 result by 58%. That’s up from 34.5% just 10 months earlier. The trend is accelerating. 8) 99.9% of AI Overviews appear on informational intent queries. Transactional, navigational, and local searches are almost entirely AIO-free. Shopping triggers AIOs just 3.2% of the time. 9) For a given search query, Google’s AI Mode and AI Overviews reach the same conclusions 86% of the time — but cite almost entirely different sources (only 13.7% citation overlap). 10) AI Overviews change every 2.15 days on average, with 70% of content differing between consecutive observations. But semantic similarity stays at 0.95. The words, sources, and entities constantly shuffle, but the actual meaning barely moves.

Very excited to share our interview with @polynoamial on AI for math — the Erdős unit distance problem, saturating the IMO, the future of math research, and more!

MAFIA EP 001

This startup wants dogs to live longer. If that’s not enough to get you to watch, we’re not sure what will. But if you need more convincing, @celinehalioua built @loyalfordogs after years of doubt and is now running the first ever FDA-concurred lifespan extension clinical trial. Featuring 1,300 really good boys and girls. And yes, everyone will get a pup cup after. Full Outlier Briefing with @kevinzhang out now.

I ran comms for Google during Oracle v. Google in 2012, tech's last big trial of the century. Watching Musk v. Altman has me flashing back hard. Fifteen observations on the trial comms war so far, in no particular order:

After 7 failed ideas, Han hit “pivot hell”—a week of no sleep, staring at the ceiling, trying to make something work. Then Mintlify clicked. Today it powers docs for 20K companies, reaching 150M people and, increasingly, AI agents. ~15% of doc traffic was AI a year ago. Now it’s ~50%. Soon, maybe 90%. Docs aren’t pages anymore. They’re context. The companies that win will be the ones that manage it best. Watch the full story ↓ @handotdev @hahnbeelee @mintlify @kevinzhang

gumloop raised a $50m series b led by benchmark here's a video we had fun making about the journey back to work.

Before @usePylon had customers, it had an air mattress. @marty_kausas had left Airbnb, heard the market was “crowded,” and was told to get a normal job. The problem wouldn’t let go. B2B support isn’t ticketing — it’s sales, success, and finance working in the same thread. Legacy tools weren’t built for that. Today: 1,500 customers. $51M raised. Still happy. Still grinding. cc: @merritthummer @Abby__Meyers

Cogent Security is building autonomous AI agents to replace broken vulnerability management with machine-speed defense. That’s why we’re proud to lead their $42M Series A round. Co-Founders Vineet Edupuganti, Geng Sng, and Thanos Baskous are building autonomous agents that close the execution gap in cybersecurity. They run as an applied AI lab, constantly improving with the models. Watch Cogent CEO Vineet Edupuganti and Rak Garg breakdown what has changed in security and how Cogent is helping security teams solve for what’s next with AI. @cogent_security @vineete_5 @snggeng @ThanosBaskous @rak_garg @EnriqueSalem

First, the good part of the Anthropic ads: they are funny, and I laughed. But I wonder why Anthropic would go for something so clearly dishonest. Our most important principle for ads says that we won’t do exactly this; we would obviously never run ads in the way Anthropic depicts them. We are not stupid and we know our users would reject that. I guess it’s on brand for Anthropic doublespeak to use a deceptive ad to critique theoretical deceptive ads that aren’t real, but a Super Bowl ad is not where I would expect it. More importantly, we believe everyone deserves to use AI and are committed to free access, because we believe access creates agency. More Texans use ChatGPT for free than total people use Claude in the US, so we have a differently-shaped problem than they do. (If you want to pay for ChatGPT Plus or Pro, we don't show you ads.) Anthropic serves an expensive product to rich people. We are glad they do that and we are doing that too, but we also feel strongly that we need to bring AI to billions of people who can’t pay for subscriptions. Maybe even more importantly: Anthropic wants to control what people do with AI—they block companies they don't like from using their coding product (including us), they want to write the rules themselves for what people can and can't use AI for, and now they also want to tell other companies what their business models can be. We are committed to broad, democratic decision making in addition to access. We are also committed to building the most resilient ecosystem for advanced AI. We care a great deal about safe, broadly beneficial AGI, and we know the only way to get there is to work with the world to prepare. One authoritarian company won't get us there on their own, to say nothing of the other obvious risks. It is a dark path. As for our Super Bowl ad: it’s about builders, and how anyone can now build anything. We are enjoying watching so many people switch to Codex. There have now been 500,000 app downloads since launch on Monday, and we think builders are really going to love what’s coming in the next few weeks. I believe Codex is going to win. We will continue to work hard to make even more intelligence available for lower and lower prices to our users. This time belongs to the builders, not the people who want to control them.