Ryan Law

i soft-launched my course last week. 154 people are currently working through it 😱 it's $99. it contains everything i know about thought leadership content: ~ ideation frameworks ~ writing techniques ~ distribution tactics ~ examples and teardowns ryanlaw.podia.com/how-to-write-t…

@foley_seo i also think that "human-driven" content is very necessary, and we'll see an uptick in personal experiences, opinion pieces, editorials, etc but the core purpose of search content has always been information arbitrage. i'm cool with AI handling it so i can do fun human stuff

@foley_seo i totally get your point (and also think over time this content becomes commoditised and eventually, worthless) but i think a lot of the human effort that goes into well-researched, accurate search content can be completely handled by AI - and better than i could do it!

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…

@damoosmann @ahrefs i have some feeds set-up to find new first-editions from my favourite authors, show me all the latest pages published on my competitors websites, and track news articles on AI search-related topics pretty cool :)

@damoosmann @ahrefs stuff liiiike: - track brand mentions in news, articles, forums, filings - monitor competitor launches, acquisitions - track product prices, availability, promotions - find data breaches, vulnerabilities - follow financial earnings and announcements - surface new research papers

NEW from Ahrefs: Firehose! we just launched a real-time data streaming API, powered by .@ahrefs massive crawler infrastructure. install from Clawhub, use the dashboard, or pump data directly into your workflows. Firehose is FREE while it's in beta: firehose.com

@ComRicheyweb @ahrefs yes that is my mistake, it is available on Lite/Standard/Advanced/Enterprise, not Starter though, apologies for the confusion

@thinking_slow @ahrefs So, not ALL paid plans then.

i sometimes joke that i joined Ahrefs just to use the API without paying for an Enterprise plan. well, now you can too ;) vibe-coders, rejoice: the .@ahrefs API is now available on ALL paid plans! time to build that SEO dashboard you've always dreamed of 🥰

@PeterMindenhall i get your points, Google does love its double standards, but genuinely: what do you think the footprints are? publishing velocity/scale seems like a likely flag to me, maybe coupled with some kind of AI detection, but AI detection for punitive reasons opens up a can of worms

@thinking_slow Doing a bunch of work to make it "not AI" kinda highlights that point that it is not as great at producing content as claimed, and nor is it very efficient either. And please, lets not fall into the trap of "Google does it everywhere, so it must be ok" Docs & Gmail are not search

#SEO - Sorry but the post lacks any evidence that AI content is now "good enough" (sustained rankings). Really handy though that arfs have made their API available to all levels though - what a coincidence...

@jwblackwell gotcha, so you almost want an API-only account in some ways? would make sense if that is most of your usage. i will pass this on to the product team :)

@thinking_slow It should be possible to use your entire account quota over the API so I don't have to log into the dashboard. I believe you charge £1k + / month right now

@PeterMindenhall i think it is not in Google's interest to penalise AI content per se, when AI content generation is such a key part of their product ecosystem, and when they do issue penalties, it seems to be egregious cases of X000 obviously spammy articles, which is not what i am advocating

@PeterMindenhall v interested in your thoughts here: what footprint? i'm skeptical on this point, because a) AI content that is anchored in human writing samples, goes through multiple editing stages, etc. is not easy to detect, and b) AI content is ubiquitous in the Google ecosystem (Docs/Gmail)

@Ashread_ just dm'ed you :)

@thinking_slow Would be great to catch up in general anyway. Want to dm the best email to get you on so we can line it up?

@jwblackwell ah sorry to hear that, restrictive how?

@thinking_slow Lots of stuff changing. Will probably be cancelling our Ahrefs subscription as the API is too restrictive

@danielmartin_a ...yes? this seems orthogonal to my point

Fair point. Most AI-generated content targeting search still lives in the traditional SERP ecosystem. One relevant data point: when Google introduced AI summaries, Google AI Overviews still displace traditional top results in about 48% of cases, meaning nearly half of the classic SERP winners don’t appear in the AI summary even when they rank highly. And across AI recommendation systems more broadly, only about 34% of entities that appear in ChatGPT also appear in Google AI Overviews, showing that each AI layer selects sources differently even when they’re all drawing from the web and SERP ecosystem. So AI-generated content can perform well, but visibility still depends on how each AI system selects and synthesizes sources from the SERP.

@fba i did! this was writing as human exploration, not writing as information arbitrage/search optimisation :)

@thinking_slow Very good piece. Who wrote it?

@Jeff_Baumgarten thank you! i've been mulling it over for a while myself

@thinking_slow I’ve thought this for some time now. You articulated it incredibly well.

@radarkitai already happened, there is no need for a human editing layer in the setups i alluded to in the article!

@thinking_slow at what point does ai content become good enough that the human editing layer stops making a meaningful difference to rankings?

@Ashread_ yeah let's do it! :)

@thinking_slow I’d love to compare notes on ai processes one day.

@krinal that is a beautiful and succinct way of putting it. i totally agree

@thinking_slow can’t say I wasn’t waiting for an update to your earlier piece/stand writing is a solved problem at this point, just like coding what to write and what to code remains a judgement problem for humans

@elion_shahini @ahrefs many people :)

@thinking_slow @ahrefs WHO the hell pay 129 dollars for this