ChatGPT accounts for 50% of all attributable referral traffic from AI chatbots 👇 (and that climbs to 67% for the smallest websites)*
so if you want to start thinking about LLMO/GEO, ChatGPT is where I would focus
*data from new @ahrefs.bsky.social study of referral traffic to 3,000 websites
my reaction too!
boooooo
there's bias here (the very nature of an "AI content survey" will attract people who are using AI), but still... wow.
are you using AI in content marketing? are you NOT? i would love to hear about your experiences
fill out this survey and have your say:
ephbu45foaj.typeform.com/ahrefssurvey
i think back to just a couple of years ago, and content marketing was something that could ONLY be done by skilled people.
now, almost everyone is using generative AI in some capacity. what an insane change!
wow—get 10 content marketers in a room, and 9 of them will be using AI.
i'm looking at the early results of our survey this morning, and it's clear that AI is eating content marketing.
i'm very bullish on AI, but the magnitude of this response has surprised me
i'm aiming for a few hundred more responses before i analyze and write a full research report... and i'll share it with you, of course :)
typeform link here: ephbu45foaj.typeform.com/ahrefssurvey
if you have a few minutes spare, i would love to hear YOUR experience using (or not using!) generative AI in SEO and content marketing.
we'll aggregate the data and report on exactly how AI is being used, how often, how good it is, and where content budget is being spent.
i personally think AI content is being published FAR more than the public discourse suggests.
i think tons of companies have quietly cut content spend and started publishing pure AI outputs.
but i want DATA to back up my opinion! so we're running a research study on AI CONTENT
apropos of absolutely nothing, i wrote a short story in bed last night:
ashtales.com/short-storie...
it's only short, 1700 words. you might dig it if you like slightly cryptic end-of-the-world stories
we spent $400,000 to bring you this guide to event marketing.
remember our conference, Ahrefs Evolve? learning how to plan, promote and run a 500-attendee international event was a HUGE journey for our tiny events team.
here's everything we learned: ahrefs.com/blog/event-m...
i need your help.
generative AI is the biggest change to content marketing and SEO since the internet. at @ahrefs.bsky.social, we're researching how AI is really changing our industry
if you have 5 minutes to spare, please fill out our survey: ephbu45foaj.typeform.com/to/krQzpc68
thank you :)
i got chatgpt to write a chrome bookmarklet that copies all h2s/h3s from a page. took about 30 seconds to get it working.
now i can copy to the clipboard all blog post titles from an index page, or all headers from an article. already used it like a dozen times.
generative AI is amazing :)
I went head-to-head with a marketing noob armed with ChatGPT to see who was the better marketer 😅
watch us create social posts, ad copy, and search-optimized blog posts... and then get blind-judged by two marketing pros
live now on AhrefsTV:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=QbBH...
ah very cool, hope you find something useful! i did some stuff like median clicks/impressions, let me know if you come up with any cool ideas :)
no great surprises from this, but it does open the door to potentially interesting cohort analyses (clicks/links/impressions by business potential score etc)
might be a fun exercise for a company very big into ToFu traffic or else struggling to generate customers from SEO/content marketing
fun little thing we did recently: used AI to categorize our blog posts by their "business potential" score
(i.e. 3 = our product is an irreplaceable solution to the problem; 0 = absolutely no way to mention our product)
77% scored high on business potential (2 or 3 BP)
13/ i will leave you with two questions:
what would i do if the diminishing returns of "traditional" SEO content came faster and harder than i expected?
how would i attract attention, add value, and make people care about my company if i couldn't rely on simple information arbitrage to do the job?
12/ some small percentage of "SEO content" has truly made the information landscape richer for its existence, but it's a very small percentage. from a user perspective, i think generative search is a good thing.
11/ we are people who have something to lose in this situation, but if we put aside our biases, it's hard to see the emergence of generative search as a bad thing.
10/ most SERPs are always, and have always, been crammed full of some mixture of irrelevant information, heavy-handed "marketing" content, or plain misinformation. generative search is often wrong, but so is traditional search—and generative search FEELS so much better. it will win. it is winning.
9/ and what does "wrong" mean anyway? what are we drawing comparison to? compare the "wrongness" of generative search to the state of "traditional" search. we're wearing rose-tinted glasses.
8/ the Google/Reddit partnership reinforces the point that vast amounts of content are created every day with no financial incentives whatsoever. these generative models will always have a vast corpus of cutting-edge discourse to imbibe. UGC is the leading edge for informational queries.
7/ the remaining gaps and edge cases—niche topics, emerging topics, revisions to existing information—will be closed even if the monetary incentives for creating SEO content disappear overnight.
6/ and the responses won't be "wrong" for very long. we've already seen that there is enough content in the world to train these models to a point of competence in many domains.
5/ even when the information is wrong, it still sounds good enough to pass muster to most searchers. and unfortunately, that is the ultimate acid test by which the efficacy of any search experience is measured.
4/ the experience of generative AI for search is already fantastic—objectively better than "old" Google Search. you can search for weird, complicated, nuanced questions and receive a perfectly contextual, customised response.
3/ i think this "stripping" process is not instant, but i think the horse has already bolted. i really can see a world where almost all rote "informational" queries will be satisfied beautifully by generative AI.
2/ obviously, that is exactly what AI Overviews does. Google is doing what Google has always done: watching to see where smart people find arbitrage opportunities in the SERP, and then—eventually—building something that strips out the arbitrage and removes the middleman.
