Patrick Stox

AI citations are now in @ahrefs Site Explorer. You can see the numbers and changes from our Brand Radar indexes on all plans, but to see the actual mentions and citations, you'll have to subscribe to Brand Radar.

Introducing EmDash — the spiritual successor to WordPress. cfl.re/3NPVfev

I don't disagree with the premise, but those are minor things and not major issues. Focus on indexing, redirects, internal linking, hreflang issues, schema (if it gets you SERP features). These are valuable things. Things that will move the needle.

@DavidGQuaid @bree_sharp @DariaSpizheva ChatGPT licensed reddit data. Something like $70M when that was first announced.

I actually called @patrickstox to talk about this on Friday - and I was like "Patrick - I think people think that LLM training = they study all of Reddit etc' Patrick will tell you - that ChatGPT and Claude dont have rights to crawl/cite reddit content Thats why they use SerpAPI and Exa etc

The fastest way to waste money on GEO? Hire someone who can’t do SEO. Most GEO strategy = • Use H2s • Add FAQs • Make content scannable Hard truth: LLMs don’t fix broken foundations. GEO is basically SEO done properly plus distribution. New acronym. Same fundamentals.

@KyleRisley There's a big difference in not rendering vs rendering at a slower rate. FWIW, you did the right thing. We should be making it easier for them, but they also should be handling it if we don't. The web is messy and that's just the way things have to work.

@patrickstox Could we have done nothing and eventually reached the same result? Maybe. Or maybe URL discovery would have plateaued at a certain point. I didn't want to wait to find out.

There's a lot of misinformation like this in our industry. They've been rendering JS for more than a decade and had some support with the AJAX crawling scheme before that. There's even a section in their docs talking about how they process it... developers.google.com/search/docs/cr…

@lilyraynyc An org that has no teeth. I had reported Semrush over their many acquisitions and not properly disclosing, i.e. backlinko. Nothing happened.

Wow. Something interesting was just brought to my attention regarding self-promotional listicles: in some cases, they may actually be *against the law,* according to FTC rules that took effect in October 2024. There is already precedent for this: A few years back, a company was sued for publishing hundreds of fake "best of" review pages that ranked their own services #1, included fabricated reviews of competitors whose products had never been used, and posted fake reviews on third-party platforms. The BBB eventually censured the company for unsubstantiated claims. (Note: I am being vague/anonymous on purpose 👀 ) This case took place before the FTC formalized these prohibitions, so the legal exposure today would presumably be much worse. I've been researching and writing about self-promotional listicles for months - the "Best [X] Companies" and "Top 10 [Y] Tools" pages where the publishing company ranks itself #1. This has arguably become the most popular GEO tactic over the last year or two because it has worked (surprisingly well) to influence SEO & GEO results. In my articles about this, I've been approaching this as a potential search quality problem. But it turns out the FTC's Consumer Review Rule (16 CFR Part 465) explicitly prohibits several practices that are common in these pages: * Creating a company-controlled site that presents itself as providing independent reviews (§465.6) * Publishing reviews of products or services you've never actually used (§465.2) * Attributing reviews to people who didn't write them (§465.2(a)) And the penalties? Up to $53,088 PER VIOLATION. Plus, each page could be a separate violation (!!) The FTC issued its first enforcement warning letters under this rule in December 2025 to 10 companies. One way to interpret this for SEOs/GEOs: if your client (or your agency) is publishing "best of" listicles that rank themselves #1 based on scores they made up, about products or competitors they never used, on a site that looks like an independent review authority... that's not just a Google quality guidelines issue anymore. It's a potential legal liability. Based on FTC guidance, the line appears relatively straightforward: you can *absolutely publish comparison content that includes your own product.* Just be honest about who you are and don't fabricate reviews of products or competitors you've never used. (BTW, this part is recommended in Google's Reviews guidelines as well.) That said, this might be tricky for most of these listicles, given that the author almost never actually tried and tested competitor products; usually they're just doing research based on publicly available data about the company. I used Claude to put together a quick reference table (see image below) breaking down what's legal and what's not under the FTC rule. (BTW, I’m not a lawyer and this isn’t legal advice; just my interpretation of the FTC’s published rules. If you’re doing this at scale, it’s worth checking with legal counsel.)

@Charles_SEO @friendlyhank You are really bad at arguing and putting words in my mouth. As usual, I need to cut off this nonsense and actually do work. You've wasted enough of my time today.

Again, this isn't a hacked site, and I am not asking about your thoughts on cloaking - I am asking about detection regression, and why you think these pages are now bypassing filtering but were not in ~2020-21 for example. And why you think Google's many other systems you talk about in the docs as gospel are not picking this up? Google itself says they struggle to render JS? You are saying: They render JS, they detect cloaking, they have strong detection systems pre and post rendering but IN REALITY, even the most basic JS and UA cloaking still ranks? How can two things be true at once...

@Charles_SEO @YoungbloodJoe I just told you why. Hank told you why. It's not shown to their crawler. As for why there's more of it, maybe the secondary systems or human review is less, or there's just so much spam they can't keep up. I don't work there, so I can only speculate.

This is one of a million examples ranking right now, and so far no one has been able to answer WHY they cannot detect this - You would think even if they were using chrome data they'd be able to correlate, but maybe they've really regressed the algo/anti-spam systems/QA that much...

@Charles_SEO @YoungbloodJoe Or some blackhat learned some basic technical SEO skills to circumvent their systems.

@patrickstox @YoungbloodJoe I am saying they USED to be able to filter it, right now, they are not? That's either rendering systems switched off or anti-spam systems switched off or a combo

@Charles_SEO @friendlyhank The script on your example isn't even shown to Google's user-agent. You can test this yourself easily. Switch your UA to googlebot and you won't be redirected either... If you really want to get fancy, you can even stop the redirect as yourself and see the script that does it.

@friendlyhank @patrickstox So there's no detection post-render either? It's JS client side on both

@Charles_SEO @YoungbloodJoe If it's cloaked, they can't see it. Come on, you're the black hat guy here.

Docs ≠ reality though... If the rendering pipeline was as consistent as you are making out, then JS-based cloaking, delayed redirects, and conditional rendering wouldn’t still be working SO WELL right now!!! AT THE MINIMUM it is heavily delayed, BUT more likely, it is currently being skipped entirely for at least MOST pages... And it SUCKS at rendering when it does.

@YoungbloodJoe I need an example page to prove it. I've built millions of pages with JS that all render. There are many on the Ahrefs website. I don't know of a page that doesn't get rendered without some other issue, so trying to find one or design an experiment around that is impossible.

Not showing you client pages my dude. If you want to prove your claims, I invite it. Prove me and tons of other SEOs wrong. Go on record with more than a link to a Google document. No clue why you would make such broad sweeping claims then shy away from developing an experiment to prove it. Seems it would be good for Ahrefs if you ended up being right.

In the GSC Insights report in Ahrefs, we've added traffic value. This is your GSC clicks * the CPC for all the keywords leading to the page.

@friendlyhank @Charles_SEO Hank gets it.

@Charles_SEO @patrickstox it's a normal 301 -> mooncatcafe .com/home/ which then JS redirects to casino lander via simple UA cloaking...this is exceedingly simple to see, a very basic setup, and nothing to do with whether or not google is rendering JS

@YoungbloodJoe Show me a page where they indexed it and haven't processed the JS without some other issue like the JS being blocked, etc. I'll wait.

@patrickstox I look forward to you and Ahrefs finding a solid way to test the efficacy of these claims because they run counter the real-world hands on experience of so many SEOs. Saying you can't is a cop out.

@Charles_SEO There's a redirect to mooncatcafe. On that site, there's a redirect script not shown to Google's user-agent... You really aren't getting it?

@patrickstox As I said, it's not hacked... You really aren't getting it? It's a JS cloaking script, you can do it inline or external, and Google won't process ANY of it...

From some of the conversations I'm having today, apparently a lot of people really need to read ahrefs.com/blog/javascrip…

@YoungbloodJoe Lol, not indexing it as fast is not the same as not rendering it... You could run this with 2 html pages and get wildly different times for indexing the pages too.

Why not just do an experiment? Build identical looking websites with different fake products/services one in HTML and one in JS and see which one gets crawled and indexed faster? Even consider adding a third one with HTML + some JS elements. Publish the results on the Ahrefs blog.

@Charles_SEO More than likely, the hackers just aren't showing the redirect to Google... Could be robots block, user-agent, IP, any number of ways they could be preventing them from seeing it.

@patrickstox Not a hacked website. What is Google NOT processing for it to redirect?

@YoungbloodJoe Show me one that doesn't.

@patrickstox They CAN but they dont always.

@Charles_SEO Looks like a hacked website that's redirected.

@patrickstox Let me know what you think of this Patrick