CMO @Ahrefs // I tweet about our (fairly unconventional) approach to marketing... and a little bit about SEO. ๐ // Born & raised in Ukraine ๐บ๐ฆ.
Joined October 2009
- Tweets 17,676
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- Followers 52,882
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1,983 Photos and videos
Pinned Tweet
8 Mar 2023
Boostrapped Ahrefs crossed $100M in ARR without these things:
No Google Analytics
No conversion tracking/optimisation
No retargeting
No A/B testing
No discounts
No bidding on competitorsโ keywords
discontinued midway:
Affiliate program
Free trial
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Jun 11
Even on short notice, I managed to pull together a few very cool folks for my mastermind dinner in Austin yesterday:
- Peep Laja @peeplaja โ CEO @ Wynter. 3x Founder.
- Nick Christensen @NickAC1 โ Head of Growth @ AppSumo
- Nick Gray @nickgraynews โ Founder of Museum Hack and Best-Selling Author
- Neville Medhora @nevmed โ Founder of SwipeFile & Kopywriting
I'm genuinely stoked about bringing Ahrefs Evolve to Austin in 2027, and getting to meet more of the local marketers and tech entrepreneurs along the way.
Live in or around Austin and wanna join the next one? Tag yourself below โ I'm keeping a list. ๐
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Jun 9
Ahrefs' Domain Rating (DR) API endpoint is now 100% FREE. ๐ฅ
Now that AI lets anyone spin up their own tools and automations, the bottleneck isn't coding anymore โ it's accessย to quality data.
And DR is one of the best shortcuts out there for sizing up how authoritative a website really is.
So we're just giving it away!
Grab it here:
docs.ahrefs.com/en/api/referโฆ
New to DR?
It rates the strength of any site's backlink profile on a 0โ100 scale.
More here: ahrefs.com/blog/domain-ratinโฆ
Now go build something cool. ๐
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Jun 8
Heading to Austin โ San Diego โ San Francisco this week.
Would love to grab coffee or lunch with founders, operators, and growth folks.
Who should I meet? ๐ ๐
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Jun 4
Once you build your first AI app, you're done for. Every single process in your day starts looking like something you should automate.
Glen Allsopp [ @ViperChill ] (Head of Marketing Strategy & Research at @Ahrefs) showed me a perfect example of this.
He used Agent A for competitive backlink research. Got exactly what he needed. Then typed: "please turn this into an application." Three minutes later he had a reusable tool that analyzes backlinks across multiple websites in 20 seconds.
Cost per run: less than one cent.
Then he did the same with his task management workflow. Then with content research. Then with marketing copy. Then with AI visibility reports. Now almost every part of his workflow has a custom tool built around it
So I invited Glen on Ahrefs Podcast to demo all of these tools live on screen, walk through how he built them with AI and what he learned in the process.
Here's what we covered:
๐ธ Why only 10% of marketers have tried building anything with AI
๐ธ The "imagination gap" that stops most people from even starting
๐ธ How a conversation with AI becomes a reusable marketing tool in 3 minutes
๐ธ Why the cheapest AI model is often the right one for marketing tasks
๐ธ Why your personal task manager should be built by you, not bought
๐ธ Why copying someone's AI app is just the starting point, not a finished product
๐ธ Why having marketing expertise matters more now, not less
Watch/Listen here ๐
youtu.be/XSLoLghiW74
P.S. If you enjoy these deep dives, a quick "Like" or comment helps us convince more great guests to come on the show. Thanks! ๐
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Jun 2
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 โ4.6%, 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%. Thatโs 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, Googleโs AI Mode and AI Overviews reach the same conclusions 86% of the time โ 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.
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Jun 3
Adding links to the 14 published studies on our blog, where I cherry-picked the above takeaways from:
1. ahrefs.com/blog/ai-overviewsโฆ
2. ahrefs.com/blog/ai-brand-visโฆ
3. ahrefs.com/blog/best-lists-rโฆ
4. ahrefs.com/blog/ai-overview-โฆ
5. ahrefs.com/blog/ai-overview-โฆ
6. ahrefs.com/blog/chatgpts-mosโฆ
7. ahrefs.com/blog/schema-ai-ciโฆ
8. ahrefs.com/blog/why-chatgpt-โฆ
9. ahrefs.com/blog/ai-overview-โฆ
10. ahrefs.com/blog/chatgpt-has-โฆ
11. ahrefs.com/blog/ai-overviewsโฆ
12. ahrefs.com/blog/short-vs-lonโฆ
13. ahrefs.com/blog/ai-overviewsโฆ
14. ahrefs.com/blog/almost-all-cโฆ
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May 28
Today, we're proud to announce a true revolution in marketing โ we're launching Agent A:
ahrefs.com/agent-a
Agent A handles marketing so well, you won't even need your CMO.
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May 26
I see big corps doing layoffs "because of AI," but I don't buy it.
Here at Ahrefs our marketing team is super AI-forward. We use AI all day every day.
And not only have we not let go of a single person because of it โ we're actively hiring for 3 marketing positions.
I also talk to a lot of people in tech. Nobody I know has actually replaced their marketers with AI. Not one.
So I'm genuinely wondering:
Does anyone here actually know a marketer whose job was automated away by AI?
Not "laid off during a round that mentioned AI." Actually replaced.
Because it seems like big corps are using AI as a convenient excuse for layoffs. But maybe I'm in a bubble.
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May 25
Our marketing team at @Ahrefs is on a quest to automate ourselves out of our jobs with AI. And nobody's losing sleep over it.
If you've ever grown in your career, you've already done this exact thing many times. You outgrow part of your job. You hand it off to someone more junior. You take on different problems.
AI is just the newest junior hire.
And this junior hire is absolutely fantastic at well-scoped, repetitive tasks. But marketing is full of work that can't be easily defined or formulated. And that's where your team should go next.
So will marketers need to reinvent themselves as AI handles parts of our job? Absolutely.
But that was always the deal. AI merely gives you a new place to delegate to.
The only people who should worry about being replaced by AI are the ones who never wanted to grow in the first place. But that was true long before AI.
โฆ
P.S. Here at @Ahrefs we're actively hiring (humans) for marketing roles. Check out our /jobs page. ๐
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May 21
Here's the most important takeaway from Google I/O for us marketers. And it's not the relief that AI Mode isn't becoming the default.
Last month I reported that Google lost ~5% of traffic share in just 10 months โ from 35.11% to 30.53% (across ~75k websites in @Ahrefs' panel). And I don't see this trend reversing with the new AI Search they announced. If anything, it's only going to accelerate.
But there's still a big opportunity for us marketers in this new era of AI Search.
When Google's AI Search answers a question, it recommends specific brands, products, and services right in the answer. And that brand visibility has real business value. The brands that get mentioned by AI are the ones that are going to get the customers.
So the real takeaway from Google I/O isn't "phew, we still get our clicks for now."
It's that the game is shifting from counting clicks to tracking how often Google's AI mentions your brand and your products when it matters.
If you aren't measuring that yet, it's about time you start. Because this is where SEO is heading.
โฆ
Friendly reminder:
Every paid @Ahrefs plan comes with a free allowance of tracked prompts in Brand Radar (our AI visibility tool).
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May 20
Here's a counterintuitive way to use AI in marketing: Ask Claude for 10 campaign ideasโฆ then ban every single one.
Those are the 10 most obvious things your competitors are already doing.
By definition, whatever AI suggests has already been done thousands of times. And executing on the most statistically average ideas possible isn't really how you get noticed.
This is one of many surprising ideas I picked up from Udi Ledergor during our recent chat on the Ahrefs Podcast.
Udi joined Gong as employee #13 and the company's very first marketer and helped grow Gong to $300M in annual revenue over the next 10 years (theyโre at $500M now). And he recently published a bestselling book called Courageous Marketing that breaks down the creative tactics behind Gong's rise.
Here's what we chatted about:
๐ธ Why "best practices" are your biggest enemy when trying to stand out
๐ธ Why Udi refused to update Gong's website for six months (despite the CEO calling it ugly)
๐ธ The "where is the party?" framework for building your audience
๐ธ How a study about salespeople swearing earned free press you can't buy
๐ธ Why the marketing budget at Gong was "unlimited" (and how to pitch that to your CFO)
๐ธ The content quality bar that made universities want to pay for Gong's blog articles
๐ธ How Udi cold-emailed Robert Cialdini for a book blurb
Watch/Listen here ๐
YouTube: youtu.be/2duaLC-X4uY
...
And if you like the work we're doing with Ahrefs Podcast, please don't forget to click "like" (both here and on YouTube). ๐
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May 18
AI search traffic to 75k websites dropped from 2.9M to 2.8M over the past 11 months. That's a 3% decline while AI adoption is at an all-time high.
[see yourself at ๐ chatgpt-vs-google(.)com]
And I don't think weโre going to see much traffic growth from AI search going forward.
AI chatbots are walled gardens. They're designed to keep you inside the chat, not send you somewhere else.
Which brings me to a bigger problem for us marketers.
How do you actually measure your performance in AI search?
Because if your websiteโs referral traffic from AI is going down, it doesn't mean your brand stopped being mentioned. AI chatbots can talk about you all day without ever sending a single click to your website.
And even bot traffic from AI crawlers isn't a reliable signal. When ChatGPT mentions your brand, that mention might be coming from a third-party website, not yours.
So the only way to actually know how you're doing in AI search is to consistently track whether you show up for the prompts that matter to your business.
This definitely comew with its own limitations and caveats. But right now,
there's nothing better.
...
P.S.
Have you tried @Ahrefs' Brand Radar for tracking your AI search visibility?
We recently added a free allowance of tracked prompts to every paid Ahrefs plan. So if you're paying customer already - you should absolutely give it a spin.
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May 15
Only ~10% of our attendees at Ahrefs Evolve have ever vibe-coded an app with AI. ๐คฏ
At least, that's how many raised their hands when I asked from stage.
I was genuinely shocked.
Here on LinkedIn, it feels like everyone is about to colonize Mars with Claude Code. But then you meet people in real life and they don't even know what "vibe coding" is.
This tells me two things:
1 - If you're already an active AI user, you probably don't realize how early you still are. What feels normal to you is still alien to most of your industry.
2 - If you're just dipping your toes in, you're not late. You're very much on time. Just don't ignore the shift that's happening around you. Learn from the peers who are a little ahead of you.
I think with Ahrefs Evolve we did a solid job showing our audience no-fluff, practical applications of AI in marketing. And calling out what's real vs. what's hype.
Next stop: San Diego in October! ๐
...
One more thing.
MASSIVE THANKS to the @Ahrefs team who pulled this whole thing together, to our amazing speakers who shared their knowledge from stage, and to our awesome sponsors who helped make the event affordable. ๐
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May 13
Ryan Law, our Director of Content at @Ahrefs, built a fully automated Claude Code workflow that creates publish-ready blog articles in just 8 mins.
It runs on 23 custom skill files Ahrefs MCP.
Ryan has already published 15 articles on the Ahrefs Blog with this workflow and updated ~30 more.
So I invited him back on the Ahrefs Podcast (his 4th appearance) to walk through his entire AI workflow step by step, while I (gently) grilled him on every detail.
Here's what we covered:
๐ธ Why obsessing over the perfect drafting prompt is the wrong place to focus.
๐ธ Why you should never compress your writing voice into a bullet list of rules.
๐ธ Why every step of your AI workflow needs to save its output.
๐ธ Why "AI slop" mostly comes from skipping the steps that matter.
๐ธ Why Ryan calls his own pipeline "overengineered."
๐ธ Why every writer on the team has their own forked version of the pipeline.
Watch on YouTube ๐
youtu.be/iVZrVeESnFQ
P.S. If you're enjoying Ahrefs Podcast, don't forget to click "Like ๐" here and on YouTube (and subscribe to the channel if you're feeling extra generous).
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May 6
Opus 4.7 is A LOT worse than 4.6.
Or is it just me?
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Tim Soulo ๐บ๐ฆ retweeted
Apr 28
Big news: Ahrefs just massively increased API limits (at no extra cost). ๐ฅณ
As Ahrefs grows in this AI era, we're opening up more data to power your marketing.
Increased API limits have been one of the top requests over the past few months, so I'm excited to be sharing this news.
Changes depend on your account level, but as an example, Standard plans now get 2.67x more credits and up to 10x more rows per request.
Over the next few weeks I'm going to be sharing some of the unique tools and workflows Ahrefs powers for my own work.
If you have any cool use cases of your own, I would love to hear those as well. ๐
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Tim Soulo ๐บ๐ฆ retweeted
Apr 28
here's the exact process we built to automate content creation using Claude Code, 23 custom skill files, and the .@ahrefs MCP:
ahrefs.com/blog/how-i-do-conโฆ
(the article also includes a YouTube video where i demo the whole system to our ever-discerning CMO, @timsoulo)
hope this is helpful, and spurs a few ideas for automating the drudgery out of your work :)
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Apr 28
Judging by Season 5 of the Ahrefs Podcast, AEO is the hottest topic in digital marketing right now.
The top 3 most popular episodes all dig deep into AI search: how to show up, what the data actually says, and which AEO myths need to die.
If you're looking for legit AEO advice, these are must-watch:
๐ฅ - How to Win in AI Search (Real Data, No Hype) โ Ryan Law (Ahrefs)
๐ฅ - World's Top SEO Expert Busts AI Search Myths โ Patrick Stox (Ahrefs)
๐ฅ - Top SEO Myths Debunked With Real Data โ Ethan Smith (Graphite)
4๏ธโฃ - 10x Your Marketing With These AI Workflows โ Kieran Flanagan (HubSpot)
5๏ธโฃ - AI Is Replacing Marketers โ Here's the 6-Step Plan to Survive โ Ryan Law (Ahrefs)
Always great to see our very own Ryan and Patrick as fan favorites. But just wait until you see the incredible guests we have lined up for Season 6.
Subscribe and stay tuned. ๐
...
P.S.
The view counts on the graphic are 100% organic. The numbers on YouTube are typically higher, since we put some paid promotion behind each episode.
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Apr 27
We're (soft) launching Agent A โ a top 1% marketer on your team.
And we're giving free 1-month access to all paying customers of @ahrefs! ๐ฅ
If you wanna learn more, I broke down what Agent A is (and how it's different from just giving Claude Code access to Ahrefs' API) over on r/ahrefs.
Would love to hear what you think.
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Apr 27
Ahrefs in Japan! ๐ฏ๐ต๐ฏ๐น
Ahrefs Japan ๅใจใชใๅฑๅคๅบๅ๐
KEIO MIRARERU VISION ๆธ่ฐทใกใฌใฆใฉใผใซใซ
ๆฒ่ผใใใพใใ๏ผ
@timsoulo ใฎๅๆฅๆฅใๆฅๆฌๆณไบบใฎ่จญ็ซใ่จๅฟตใใใใใฆใๆฅๆฌใฎใใผใฑใใฃใณใฐใฎๆชๆฅใๆฏใ็ถใใใจใใๅผทใๆณใใ่พผใใฆๅถไฝใใพใใใ
่จๅฟตๆ ๅใใใฒใ่ฆงใใ ใใ๐
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