Ahrefs marketing and SEO content digest

Welcome to a new issue of the Ahrefs' Digest. Time passes fast. Too quick, as my aged bones would agree. In just a blink of an eye (if one blink was two weeks), Evolve San Diego will be here! (Btw, my "blink of my eye" joke comes from this TikTok trend.) Have you gotten your tickets yet? If you haven't, you should! It's going to be a blast. Last year's Evolve was amazing, and this year's will be too. If there's anything you know about us, we don't hold back. If we make an event, we make an event. I will be there too, to demo our products, so if you have any questions or anything you're unsure about, I'll help you out. (I don't bite, my dentist disapproves.) Anyhoo, one of you replied last week saying this: "I loved Andy’s study. I think as content marketers, we are definitely getting lazy. Where we used to spend days researching and sitting with data and drafting content, it’s now probably hours." That reminds me of something I was riffing on a while back. You know how marketers say AI is making us faster (and our study below shows it, too)? What if it's not making us faster, but simply making us lower our standards? In the past, we might have had some standards for our content because we put in the time, or the effort, or maybe paid for it. Now we don't have to. We can just keep publishing, "moving faster", simply because it's so cheap and fast. What do you think? Does my riff have legs, or am I just waffling? Hit 'reply' and tell me. Moving on to our meme of the week: — Quick search marketing news Google has released the September 2026 spam update. Google introduces a new web multimodal filter in Search results, and Generative AI features reports globally. The data includes searches with Lens, Circle to Search on Android, image uploads to Google Search, and the Chrome right-click "Search this image" feature. Google announces R4T-Diffusion, a new query fan-out framework. OpenAI announces the release of GPT‑6.1 Sol, an upgrade to GPT‑6 Sol that nearly matches GPT‑6 Astra’s intelligence on agentic coding, computer use, and professional work at one-fifth of Astra’s standard input and output token prices. OpenAI introduces Dots, always-on agents in ChatGPT that can take on ongoing responsibility and keep making progress between conversations. — Best of the week 69% of Marketers Are Publishing More AI Content Than Last Year (New Research Report): It's like what my colleague Mateusz says: it's Cold War logic. If competitors are using AI to run faster than you, then just to keep up, you have to use it too. My only concern is what "faster" means. Because it means nothing if there’s no strategy or serious thought behind it. AI Visibility Data Paralysis: How to Get Unstuck: Honestly, if you're struggling to understand what to do with regards to AEO or figure out how to get more AI visibility, just read this. Inside 12 months of AI Search Experiments: HubSpot's traffic decline went viral last year. But they were prepared and went straight at bat by running AI search experiments. I enjoyed their "glossary for bots" experiment, where they created an LLM-friendly glossary that paired useful definitions with contextual HubSpot product mentions. Seems like something we can do at Ahrefs too. Don't Get Addicted To Painkillers: In this definition, a painkiller is "an explanation that makes everything click", so that we can remove our cognitive load and exhaustion. I'm guilty of being addicted to this. I'm sure many of us are too, especially as we work in SEO and now in this extremely uncertain environment. Painkillers are not bad per se; they do allow us to get somewhere, but too much of them (as with anything) is bad for us. We need to know when to stop. — Latest from our podcast This week’s podcast guest is my brilliant co-worker Louise Linehan, content marketer at Ahrefs. In this episode, Louise, who mined online discussions and validated them against 18 months of Keywords Explorer data, shares the five AI search tren