Director of Content Marketing @Ahrefs • I tweet about writing, SEO & marketing • Solving the hard parts of content marketing: https://xitter.cf/t.co/VCUFhtGh0n
Aylesbury, UK
Joined September 2014
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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-wri…
gone are the days of compounding search traffic, ordinal search rankings, forecasting based on predictable click-through and conversion rates.
today, your content pages are grist for the AI mill, their contents scraped from the page, blended together with competing pages, and shown to the user—if you're lucky—in a context and format controlled entirely by a third party.
forgotten is the handshake agreement that good content will be rewarded by website visitors. instead, most people who interact with your content will do so through an intermediary like Google's AI Overviews or a ChatGPT response.
but most pages are still created with the assumption that people will visit them directly. how does content change if we abandon that idea?
my new article on the Ahrefs blog explores the idea of "headless" content marketing: ahrefs.com/blog/headless-con…
Ryan Law retweeted
16-hour flight back to Singapore... a few days as a jetlagged zombie... and I'm finally ready to drop my @Ahrefs Evolve recap.
In short: it was amazing.
It generated 260+ posts from 150+ people on LinkedIn (according to my AI agent). All of them positive. Not a single complaint.
Here are the highlights:
1. "What AI says about you is what the web says about you."
This line from my keynote ended up being the most-repeated takeaway from the event. I've always said that SEO (when done right) is a rather holistic marketing discipline. And now with AI search, that's become painfully obvious.
2. "Small Talks" were the breakout format.
We gave 9 attendees 5 minutes each on the main stage to share ONE cool thing. It was a massive hit!
I said in my kickoff talk that many people in the room were just as knowledgeable as the speakers on stage. The Small Talks proved it.
3. "Sponsor Grilling" was a big hit.
I asked our four sponsors tough questions on stage and didn't let them get away with vague answers (there were also some jokes involved). Nearly everyone I talked to said it was their favorite segment of the day. So we're definitely keeping this format for 2027.
4. On a more personal note...
Here's the irony of running a conference: you bring all these amazing people together and then you're too busy running around to actually talk to any of them.
I'm a bit jealous of our own attendees, honestly. They had way more quality time with the cool people we had at Evolve than I did. 😢
5. And finally...
Gotta give MASSIVE credit to my team. We pulled off this entire event with a tiny crew and limited resources.
I'm proud of every single person who helped made it happen and super thankful for your hard work and commitment.
Now back to you:
What's the ONE thing that separates a great event from a forgettable one for you personally?
We're already collecting ideas for 2027. 🙃
P.S.
I also announced the launch of my book at Evolve. It's called DISCOVERABLE and it's already available for pre-order on Amazon. 😉
if 🚨 "automating content creation" 🚨 sounds spammy or black hat... you might want to read this.
my awesome colleague @siquanong just shared how he uses content automation to automagically update articles, keep their data accurate and fresh, prevent hours of tedious work... and make content that is objectively better for the reader.
even if you never use AI to generate search content, there is a serious case for enlisting it to help update your existing content. SQ explains precisely how to he does it on the Ahrefs blog:
ahrefs.com/blog/automated-co…
my 6 biggest takeaways from @brightonseo (and a recap video, ft. special guests @TheCoolestCool, @chimammeje, @SimpsonGareth):
- most companies are now in a routine of tracking AI visibility. it's not some niche tactic or edge case; it is viewed as necessary. more sophisticated companies are already moving beyond prompt tracking and starting to explore the distributions of their brands within different topics and models (something Brand Radar is uniquely good at, btw)
- SEOs are in charge of AI visibility, it falls within their purview, which is cool. that's a great opportunity for SEOs: we have a new thing to own, a new way to add value to companies, which is good because...
- organic traffic from content marketing continues to tank across the board, a common thread among every established company i spoke with
- there is still a big gulf in understanding how advanced AI has become, particularly for marketing workflows. many people are still stuck in the preconception that AI is just a chat interface you talk to and get things back from. fewer people are using things like agentic harnesses and MCPs to their full potential
- huge changes are underway for websites and website infrastructure. traditional WYSIWYG editors and CMSs are falling out of favor relative to headless CMSs and tools that allow AI to interact natively with web page content
- i sense a growing bifurcation in how content is created and the function it plays within companies. more companies are embracing content created primarily for AI retrieval, optimizing for brevity, directness, clear attribution... and assuming people won't read it. at the other end of the spectrum, there is still huge value in brand content, social media content, research, original perspectives, and ideas (just don't expect them to get much traffic from organic search)
as always, i learned a ton and got to chat with dozens and dozens of awesome, smart SEOs and marketers. until the next one :)
p.s. big thanks to Miro for the awesome recap video and the whole @ahrefs crew for all their hard work
Ryan Law retweeted
Big announcement! I wrote a BOOK!!!
It's called DISCOVERABLE, and it's 223 pages of my best thinking about marketing.
It is:
- 60% first principles of marketing that I've developed over 15 years of doing it.
- 20% stories of how I helped grow @Ahrefs from under $8M to over $150M in ARR.
- 20% stories of other companies and brands that inspired me.
The underlying narrative is simple.
There are only three ways how people discover products and businesses:
1. They search. On Google, ChatGPT, TikTok, Amazon, etc.
2. They notice. Advertising, or content that gets organic traction.
3. They talk. People recommending you to their friends and peers.
In my book, I'm explaining the fundamental forces behind making each of these three pillars work for your business.
The book is not technical at all. No graphs. No diagrams. No dashboards. It doesn't teach you how to use marketing tools or how to succeed on specific platforms.
I wanted to make sure that the ideas from this book would be relevant for years to come, no matter what changes our industry will face going forward.
Without a doubt, this is the best piece of writing/thinking about marketing that I've ever produced.
And it would mean the WORLD to me if you'd grab a copy and give it a read. 🙏
Already available for pre-order on Amazon (dot com).
Release date: November 24, 2026.
P.S.
I was telling everyone it took me 2 years to write this book. Then I opened the revision history of the "master" Google Doc, and it was 4 years old.
announcing a fun side quest: Conference Spotter! find upcoming SEO and marketing events in the UK to attend, speak at, or even sponsor.
- see ~50+ upcoming marketing events in one place
- search and compare events by location, current lowest ticket price, event popularity, social buzz, even speaker experience
- for speakers: see a curated list of events with open speaker pitching processes
- for events organisers: add your own event!
i built it to solve my own problem: i want to speak at more events next year, but it's a nightmare trawling the web to find them. the site aggregates marketing/SEO events into one place, and updates key data (like best available ticket price) automatically each week. problem solved 😌
the whole site and infrastructure is built with @letaidocom (including buying the domain and deploying the live site, pretty cool!) and our new web mentions tool, Firehose. if you want to know more, i discuss the whole project with @timsoulo on an upcoming episode of the @ahrefs podcast!
importantly, the mascot is called Spot and he existed before ChatGPT's Dots and Meta's Muse...
check it out, poke around, and let me know if you have any cool feature ideas you'd like me to build: conferencespotter.com/
p.s. there is a soon-to-be-announced easter egg in these screenshots 🤫
AI Overviews now trigger for 83% of *branded* searches in the US... including searches for brand names like "bluehost" or "ibm" 😅
h/t @chris_nectiv who spotted AI Overviews for 93 of the 100 enterprise brand searches he tested. his findings prompted us to investigate across 232.8 million US desktop search results. we found:
- branded‑query AI Overviews reached 82.9% on September 29. the September average was 73.3%, up from 61.3% in July
- they’re usually near the top. in a separate study of 100 major brand names, 63 triggered an AI Overview by September 30. of those, 76.2% AIOs appeared in position one
- Wikipedia and YouTube were the leading external sources. they appeared in 71.9% and 38.6% of the 57 available citation lists, respectively
but thankfully...
- direct competitor references were uncommon. only two of 58 readable answers explicitly discussed competitors, and only one of 57 source lists cited a verified competitor‑owned website
tl;dr - people searching for your brand are increasingly getting Google’s summary first, instead of your homepage - potentially reducing clicks to your website and giving third‑party sources a bigger say in how your brand is presented
thanks again Google 🥹
full post: ahrefs.com/blog/ai-overviews…
pumped to be back in Brighton in a couple of weeks' time for brightonSEO!
i'm spilling the beans about our AI content workflows at Ahrefs: how we automate boring SEO content (yes, fully automate), how we find and fix outdated content across 1,100 blog posts, how we automate reporting, and most importantly... how we're making the coolest content we've ever made, thanks to generative AI :)
come watch the talk on Thursday 8 October, Auditorium 1, 5:20 pm - you will leave with a head full of ideas and a camera roll full of prompts
Ryan Law retweeted
Believe it or not, we [@Ahrefs] have DOUBLED our API/MCP limits on all plans! 🔥
AI is making it stupidly easy for marketers to build their own tools.
The bottleneck isn't code anymore, it's quality data.
@Ahrefs operates one of the largest marketing datasets in the world, and now all our users can pipe it directly into whatever they're building.
Exciting times!
i've built tons of AI apps and workflows, most of them get thrown away or abandoned, BUT... i use this one simple little tool every day:
it's called "competitor feed", and it's dead simple, basically an old-school RSS feed with a few AI features added in. but i love it! and it's literally the first thing i check every day.
it shows me a live feed of all the latest content my competitors have published. i check it every morning, hotkey through the list to save/decline ideas, add my notes and ideas for future reference.
and the cool AI stuff:
- it autosuggests relevant competitors to follow (using Ahrefs MCP > organic competitors report) and automatically adds their sitemaps
- it shows me the closest matching articles on my blog (using vector embeddings and cosine similarity)
- it pulls relevant keyword data from the Ahrefs MCP on request
- it analyses the past 30-days of content for each competitor and tries to summarise their content strategy (helpful for spotting trends/themes i might have missed)
it takes a few minutes a day to stay completely on top of what our competitors are publishing, and i can get inspiration and assign new topics and keywords to the Linear board (where i manage our blog team) in a couple of seconds.
the era of personal software is pretty cool, i recommend making something like this if you run content marketing/SEO for a brand :)
Ryan Law retweeted
We're giving away 3 "Standard pass" tickets to @Ahrefs Evolve in San Diego (12-13 Oct)!
To enter, just complete BOTH of the following steps:
1. Like this post.
2. Leave a comment & tell us where you're traveling from.
...
/ Entries close on Friday 18th Sept 10PM (Pacific time).
/ Winners will be announced by Tuesday 22th Sept.
...
Visit our website for more details - ahrefsevolve(dot)com
...
NOTE: the prize is "Standard pass" ticket only, which doesn't include travel or accomodation.
Ryan Law retweeted
10,000,000+/day 😮 → It's crazy how much you folks use @ahrefs ' free Domain Rating API.
And we couldn't be happier about it. 🤗
DR has been the industry standard for assessing a website's link authority for years. But now, with free API access, it's quickly becoming ubiquitous.
Oh, and a fun behind-the-scenes detail:
Usage actually peaked at over 50M+/day back in July, shortly after we announced it. That's when we realized that making the API usage anonymous was a mistake. 😅 Once we required everyone to register a (free) account to use it, the numbers calmed down a bit.
carne asada fries on the seafront. neon and palm trees. internet friends becoming IRL friends. plotting SEO shenanigans over West Coast IPAs. @Kevin_Indig DJing. the very big screen and even bigger ideas. more carne asada fries.
i miss @ahrefsevolve San Diego with a vengeance. but it's okay, because it's almost here again 🥰
October 12-13, the best SEO, AEO & AI marketing conference around returns to glorious San Diego. that means @randfish, @MarketingProfs, @TheCoolestCool, @aleyda, another dozen+ legendary speakers...
...and yes. more carne asada fries!
you should come too: ahrefsevolve.com/
Ryan Law retweeted
Pretty wild I just threw this together in 3 minutes for a project I'm working on with @ahrefs @letaidocom
Ryan Law retweeted
New research: Just three sites account for 76% of Google's 'Discussions and forums' links worldwide.
Reddit appeared in 83.9% of results, which is surprisingly the lowest share we've seen in two years. That said, it's already growing again in August.
Even though it's so prevalent across English-language results, I don't see this SERP feature discussed too often. I wanted to change that, so spent some time diving into the data.
Do new forums rank well? What about new subreddits? How much do backlinks help individual threads? I tried to answer all of the questions and more.
Link in the first reply, or check out the last post on the Ahrefs blog.
I hope you find it valuable! 🙌
THIS THURSDAY! join me and three content marketing legends for a roundtable discussion about AI content marketing :)
we'll get nitty-gritty and ultra-nerdy with questions like:
- what tools and workflows do you use for AI content?
- how do you avoid creating AI slop?
- how do you feel about the risks of publishing AI content?
- where does generative AI still totally suck?
featuring @KirstiLang from @buffer, Emma Young from @Hostinger, and @timmetz from @animalzco! (and the awesome Kamila from @ahrefs moderating)
register now for freeeeee: ahrefs.zoom.us/webinar/regis…
Ryan Law retweeted
Some real truth here in that SEO was almost too easy and the economics were too good for too long - and leaders got "addicted" to this fast traffic with great "per click" economics vs paid - so now when people sour on SEO maybe what they are really upset about is how little attention they could pay to it, and reasonably rely on this traffic for such a low relative investment?
ahrefs.com/blog/seo-is-still…
if you're a writer worried that AI is sucking the soul out of your content creation... have hope 🕊️
my awesome colleague @m_makosiewicz published ten weird and wonderful workflows that pair old-fashioned human grey matter with novel uses of AI, including:
- the "Living Draft" method (perpetual stew anyone?)
- getting AI to interview YOU about a topic
- generating literally 100 angles for your article
- using mental models to constrain content creation
and many more! AI content doesn't have to be all pipelines and automation, it can be weird and wonderful too :)
check it out: ahrefs.com/blog/creative-way…
