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.

Next week! Are you ready for this one? Ian Howells (@ianhowells) is traveling to Raleigh to present at Triangle SEO Meetup on Tuesday, March 24th from 6:00 PM to 8:00 PM at the FM:Systems Office.

@JoyanneHawkins @DirigoCreative @ahrefs @timsoulo It's live. Thanks for the suggestion Joy.

@patrickstox @DirigoCreative @ahrefs @timsoulo Thank you! Appreciate you working on it. I can't wait to use it.

@ahrefs @timsoulo wanted to make sure I was understanding this correctly. Is this organic pages drop I'm seeing pretty consistently in the fall due to the 100 results thing? Is there any way to use this metric historically now? I used to use it a lot and am struggling to find it useful lately.

@luddeluddeludde @thinking_slow Bad news: that is the current state. Good news: our data science team is working on this right now!

@patrickstox @thinking_slow Is it correct to assume that Ahrefs organic traffic estimates currently don’t account for CTR changes when AI Overviews are present in the SERP (e.g. -58% CTR in your study)?

Probably the most unpopular thing I've ever written: Until recently, AI content wasn’t good enough for SEO. Now, it is. The sooner we can admit it, the more time we have to focus on the parts of marketing where humans will have a longer, happier tenure: ahrefs.com/blog/ai-conten…

Ahrefs just launched Firehose -- a real-time web monitoring API. I spent a few hours on my bike building an SEO playbook around it. 8 use cases with ready-to-use Lucene queries and a production Python script. Here's what's inside: 1. Daily competitor content monitoring 2. Removed content detection (content gaps opening up) 3. Link opportunity prospecting via anchor text tracking 4. Content decay early warning signals 5. Listicle & roundup link finder 6. Brand & citation monitoring (big for GEO) 7. Competitor feature/launch detection 8. International SEO signal tracking Plus a full Python consumer script that runs as a morning cron job and pushes a daily digest. Drop a comment or DM and I'll send you the PDF and script. Or not.

@JoyanneHawkins @DirigoCreative @ahrefs @timsoulo On one of the devs to-do list. Shouldn't be too much longer, but I don't have an exact ETA.

@patrickstox @DirigoCreative @ahrefs @timsoulo Any update or timeline on this?

Ahrefs improved how Site Audit detects missing alt attributes to exclude decorative and tracking images. + we added them to Patches. They can be generated for individual images or in bulk, reviewed and edited, and then published with JS or Cloudflare workers.

Screenshot 1: Grokipedia - projected organic traffic 2. Grokipedia ChatGPT citations 3. Grokipedia AIO citations 4. Grokipedia AI mode citations Interesting how closely ChatGPT aligns with Google organic traffic 👀 All data from @ahrefs

Firehose beta is live. Track new content on the web in real time. API-first. Built for AI agents. Ahrefs crawls 8B+ pages a day, so you get notified as soon as we discover content or changes matching your topic. SSE delivery. Lucene filtering. Simple API. For news, brand monitoring, and competitive intel. Your agent can follow a topic and send you a daily digest. Free during beta.

Ian Howells has been hacking together SEO tools since before AI could write a line of code. Now with Claude Code the gloves have come off.

920392843920 people have asked me how I get insights out of Ahrefs Brand Radar. Here's me actually going through and looking at insights for Ahrefs: youtube.com/watch?v=VXFX1Q…

@rustybrick @lilyraynyc @gaganghotra_ Hmmm... Looking into it. I was just surprised to see it, but now I wonder if it's a bug on our end. Removed the post for now.

@lilyraynyc @patrickstox @gaganghotra_ so curious, semrush showing semrush.com/sensor?compare…

@lilyraynyc @gaganghotra_ Yep. Do a blank search in Brand Radar and you can see it.

@patrickstox @gaganghotra_ This is total appearance of AIOs overall?

@rustybrick We're seeing them on a lot less terms. From ~120M to ~49M in our database. I was spot checking some and they either have featured snippets, SERP features, or nothing.

@patrickstox what?

Do Google's AI search competitors have a (growing) spam problem? By the metrics I have available, they're increasingly citing low-quality domains. Using Ahrefs Brand Radar, I analyzed the top 1,000 sites mentioned on each platform over the past three months. ChatGPT, Copilot, and Perplexity are referencing a growing number of sites that get little or no traffic from Google. Ranking well in Google doesn't automatically mean a website is valuable, but I've manually looked at hundreds that thrive in AI but struggle in search, and almost all are… questionable. Fake or no authors. Thousands of AI-created articles with no obvious theme. eCommerce stores with 100K+ random items, etc. I'm not here to judge, but you've probably seen the kind I mean. While this analysis definitely isn't perfect — don't quote it just yet — it almost looks like Google's major competitors are going backwards on the quality front. I expect we'll see improvements from all of them this year, so I'll keep tracking the numbers. I've added a few more notes at /zero.txt (link at the bottom of the graphic), but I'm always open to feedback and suggestions to improve this analysis going forward. 🤝 I just find it super interesting to watch them tackle a challenge Google has been working on for so long. P.S. It’s admittedly possible the zero traffic domains rank for *something* in Google, but currently nothing across the entire Ahrefs database.

We heard your feedback. @ahrefs Report Builder is now more accessible, with higher limits to make reporting easier for everyone. 📈 -More reports & widgets for Lite+ -Scheduling now on Standard+

@NickLeRoy @JHTScherck @ahrefs @ViperChill Fighting Google every day... Sorry.

@JHTScherck @ahrefs @patrickstox and @ViperChill FYI.

Ok, getting enough confirmation to know that this is happening to more than just us. @ahrefs - please make it so you error out and say "no data collected" or re-run the rank tracker vs marking it zero please. We got OKRs riding on this data.

😂😂😂 I couldn't agree more with this statement.

@gaganghotra_ TIL people pretend to work at Ahrefs on LinkedIn. We don't have that many people.

per LinkedIn Ahrefs - 194 employees Profound - 168 employees Profound probably in next few months will overtake Ahrefs for head count 👀 Ahrefs do over $100M ARR I wonder how much ARR Profound is doing? #SEO