uSERP

I've built an absurd amount of links for ~10yrs now, for 600+ clients from startups to publicly traded companies. 10 rules about link building in the AI era: Look, John Mu is right. All links are not created equal. A backlink is not a backlink. You can buy links for $10 a pop on Fiverr. And you can buy links for $2,000. A "link" is not standardized whatsoever. 1. Domain scores and ratings in a silo is garbage. easy metric to game. You must analyze a website top to bottom: DR, traffic, keyword positions, traffic history, how many external links do they give, brand volume, content quality, etc 2. Directories, profile links, etc, are not the same as as contextual links within the body of an article. If anyone can make an account + acquire a link, it's defeating the entire purpose of why links are a ranking factor... they are exclusive, hard to get, and pass real earned trust. A real valuable link is one that people can't get for free in 5 mins folks. 3. Stop being scared of nofollow. Seriously, it's not 2010. Some of the best links on the internet are nofollow by default. 4. "I need only unique root domains" is a great way to say "I don't understand SEO." Yes, you want more domains total linking to you, great. But, you're letting "unique root domains" stop you from getting multiple links from the same great domain? That is nonsense. Repeat links from high authority domains = repeat trust signal. One link gets removed? Cool, you have 3 more from that domain. Or you don't, because you believed "one link per domain" was smart. 5. Relevance is a sliding scale, not a binary yes or no. Acquiring true tier 1 relevant backlinks is very rare. Why? Anyone who's entire site is dedicated to the exact same topic your site is dedicated to is...competing with you either on product or SEO, or both, and is almost never going to link back to you. The more you try to get 1-1 relevance the less links you get, slower, and the worse your pages rank. There is a balance between relevance and volume that must be struck. 6. Anchor text is still important, but so is the context surrounding the anchor. Google openly admitted to struggling with context around a link many years ago, but they since improved. 7. Please stop adding UTMs to a link. That is...not going to pass any value! 8. Affiliate links do not pass link equity either, so know what play you're doing before you do it. 9. Link building is a proxy for brand awareness and authority. But, you can't just "build a brand" and get links when you need rankings now. Go build some. 10. Pick the right pages on your site to target with link building. You need a blend between high impact, hard to rank product pages AND genuine content that takes zero convincing for someone to link back to. ✌️

“AI is running our entire SEO and GEO strategy.” The AI:

I've been saying this forever: the "CTR is dying" panic is a top-of-funnel problem. Nobody was going to click your "what is CRM" post and buy anything. So when Google absorbs that query into an AI Overview, what exactly did your business lose? Traffic that never converted? A vanity line on a dashboard? Less traffic, but zero impact to conversions? Go down the funnel and the story is night and day different. SERP features thin out, AI Overviews are less common, and CTR goes UP!! The queries with actual money to be made still send actual clicks. Really nice study by Scrunch, Kevin White and team, with good data on millions of real search events, and it's the closest thing to receipts on this subject I've seen. Key stat: news searches with an AI Overview convert to a click 20% of the time vs 30% without. However, when they compared the SAME query with and without an AI Overview, the gap shrank to ~2 points. The 10-point gap isn't AIO eating clicks and signaling the death of CTR from search...it's Google placing AI Overviews on queries that really never produced valuable or meaningful clicks to begin with. Weather queries get an AIO 59% of the time. Sports scores, where people click through at a 53% rate? 5% of the time. This also is what I've been preaching for ages: most studies on CTR that determine the industry is going towards zero click are not looking at business queries, but general information searches people make on a daily basis. And most of those don't warrant a click through in the first place compared to deep research B2B buying intent searches. We see it in the 40-50 prospect sites we analyze monthly at uSERP. People are losing tons of traffic but conversions are the same. Why? Most of their traffic came from TOFU content that never produced a ton of ROI in the first place. Yet BOFU comparison and buying-intent pages are holding, and converting just the same as before. Two more interesting points from this study: 1. People who talk to ChatGPT about a topic are 20.5 points MORE likely to visit related sites the following week. Remember, AI, Google, etc, it's all symbiotic. People are using all of the above, it's not a zero sum game! 2. Only 1.1% of those follow-up visits carry an AI referral. The rest show up as direct and ordinary search. Study by Scrunch, link in comments. Worth the full read, not sponsored!

SEO gurus on LinkedIn: Link building is dead in the AI era! The same gurus: You need your own content to rank well in Google SERPs, that is a core function of AI mentions and visibility! Right...got it. And how does one rank their own content in hyper competitive SERPs? Surely it's got nothing to do with authority, links, mentions, right? Surely it can't be exactly how Google describes, in their own words in "how search works" documentation of what makes good quality content? "if the content is repeatedly cited and linked to by trusted publications." One cannot claim that (a) links are not impactful anymore and (b) you need to rank your own website content in traditional organic to increase AI visibility. The two, in 99% of spaces, ARE mutually exclusive. This space is so rife with snake oil and bad actors, and feels like it becomes more soulless by the day. Every GEO optimization methodology I've read on LinkedIn is a fancy way of rebranding existing concepts. 1. Creating good quality content at the bottom of the funnel (calling it something fancier now that sounds more GEO than SEO so you can charge more) 2. Getting good quality backlinks in relevant articles (calling it mentions and citations instead of links so you can charge more) 3. Doing good technical SEO (calling it llms txt instead so you can charge more) "But dude, people rank on page 9 of Google and get cited by AI!" Yes, for obscure long-tail queries. Yes, as citations for those, rarely MENTIONS for buying decision prompts in ChatGPT. The pillars of good GEO are creating really good BOFU content that answers queries for multiple diverse target markets you serve and ranks well in traditional organic too -- which in 99% of spaces where any money is to be made, requires lots of backlinks to said pages to rank said content -- getting mentions in relevant content from domains that LLMs cite (fancy-er type of link building) -- and ensuring technical foundations are set.

AI visibility, prompt tracking and measuring qualified leads from GEO are still in their infancy. One day you’re the most cited brand cited in AI Overviews. A week later you’re nowhere to be found. So when Ahrefs announced Letaido, I knew this was a tool I could rely on for years to come. Everyone loves Claude and Lovable. Letaido gives you the same flexibility, but grounded in real data. And because it pulls its data directly from Ahrefs, you don’t have to worry about AI hallucinations. I use it to run backlink analysis and build AI visibility reports across multiple client sites. You can even turn it into an application so you’re not starting a new chat every time. And the best part? It costs less than a cent to run. If you're serious about increasing your brand's AI visibility, this is the tool to reach for. *In partnership with Ahrefs

Ahrefs doesn’t get nearly enough credit for offering one thing that most tools don’t: free tools that actually get the job done. Most brands are chasing short-term hacks to win in AI search. It backfires every time if you’re not building on the fundamentals first. You don’t need an enterprise budget to learn those fundamentals. Ahrefs’ free tools let you run a site audit, explore your backlink profile, and track where your traffic is actually coming from (even the ones from AI chatbots). You can see which pages are pulling real traffic, find valuable backlinks to boost your ranking and spot what’s holding your site back. Master the fundamentals first. The paid tools are worth the dollar once you know what you're looking at. *In partnership with Ahrefs

I’m so sick of gurus spewing 35 GEO and AI Search hacks when they personally drive ZERO business from them... 47% of my agency's leads in the last 30 days came from AI. Here's what ACTUALLY WORKS for us. Every week another "AI Search Expert" posts gimmicky hacks to increase AI mentions. llms.txt. Chunking. Made-up EEAT garbage that magically powers you into every AI answer. One magic technical fix. Unlimited programmatic pages. Fairy dust and good vibes! Here is what has worked for us: 1- Rank well in traditional Google search for your BOFU terms. Gurus convinced the masses "traditional SEO is dying." Yet almost 40% of our leads still come from 5-10 keywords on Google, and they convert with budget. Our AI search lead gen also directly rises and drops with these rankings. 2- Get positioned on directories people use to make purchase decisions. AI draws on these and will continue to. 3- Get positioned on comparisons, roundups, and listicles. Obvious! 4- Build TONS of contextual backlinks in a service-related context, NOT on listicles. Less obvious, just as important, and so forgotten it works even better now. 5- Drive social engagement around the exact context of your product. Mostly second and third order impacts of branding. Didn't create new content or articles that mattered, at all. Didn’t do content refreshes and chunking. All we did was focus on building a reputable brand tied to one key segment of a market, even long before AI search was a talking point btw, now doubling down via the 5 points above. Whether AI mentions you comes down to: does the market, your website, your customers, and third-party sources tell the same story about why your brand belongs in the answer? Everyone preaches "positioning" and "category alignment." Of course this matters...but what is it, actually, in practice? Consensus about your brand across the internet. You build it by ranking well with your own site (which unironically begets more backlinks and mentions without lifting a finger btw) and getting other sites to talk about you. In other words, tons of off-page SEO and third-party discussions. People love to say "old SEO is dying"...ok... TOFU SEO is dying, sure I'll give you that. BOFU is stronger than ever. Hot take: people that equated "more traffic good!" with good SEO never knew how to do good SEO in the first place: GET REVENUE. Pull up my site on Ahrefs and you'll laugh. "They lost tons of organic traffic!" Correct. None of it converted anyways. Yet we still rank first page for the buying keywords that drive millions a year in revenue. The ONLY thing that matters in SEO is ROI. People are skeptical on HubSpot's data showing 90%+ of AI search mentions (NOT CITATIONS which is going to be lower) come from third party sites. I'm not, because I've done all the above and it mostly equates to: the more we get mentioned and talked about the more leads we get. And you can only talk about yourself on your own site for so long! / Rant over! ✌️

Authority is a wider bucket now. If your content strategy doesn't account for how social influences both the SERP and LLMs, you're leaving real pipeline on the table. AI engines only pull from your own site 8% of the time when recommending you. The other 92% comes from third-party sites that mention and discuss the topic. Ahrefs’ Brand Radar helps you track the intent behind these prompts and understand why different source materials are cited. From there you can reverse engineer your strategy to build consensus across every touch point that matters: your website (content marketing), third party sites (link building), directories (off-page SEO), social/forums (off-page). It shows you core prompts where your business could be the recommended solution, and how LLMs are arriving at that conclusion. If your strategy for both SEO + AI search does not include link building, PR, and brand building, you are going to see poor results. #ahrefspartner

SEO didn't die or get replaced by AI. It overlapped and expanded to capture new opportunities, making SEO the center of conversations again. Ahrefs just launched Agent A, which is a serious unlock for competitive backlink research. I saw Glen Allsopp last week share how he uses it to build AI visibility reports and analyze backlinks across multiple sites in under a minute. And because it pulls its data directly from Ahrefs, hallucination isn’t a concern. Any marketer or SEO can replicate these workflows or build their own with Agent A. The marketers who win in the AI search era are the ones willing to embrace it. #ahrefspartner