Tim Soulo of Ahrefs - Massive shifts in SEO industry, AEO, plus what content works (and doesn't)

Tim Soulo runs Ahrefs, a $150m/yr search optimization software, and has deep insights into where the SEO industry is going, and how AI is affecting each part of it.

After every interview I manually take notes on them, so if you want to read my notes here they are bellow:

(0:00) Intro

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(1:14) Have you ever felt a shift in SEO quite so hard as the AI shift? Many changes go like this, “First gradually then suddenly.” SEO has always been gradually shifting, but now we’re in the period of “suddenly.”

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(2:38) Where is SEO going? What’s the motivation of sharing knowledge if it just gets taken and regurgitated by AI?

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(4:19) Neville’s theory of what will happen to writing.

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(6:44) Two kinds of content: Topics that’ve existed for a long time, and completely new topics that’ve just come up. Older topics will be harder to rank for, brand new timely content can do well.

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(9:25) First hand real-world experience stories will still do well. You do something in the real world then talk about it in your online content.

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(10:20) In SEO it feels like everything is different, but at its core it’s exactly the same. If you have a crazy experience and document it, that still works well.

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(11:46) Becoming “discoverable” is the most important. Search tactics and platforms will change, but people still search.

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(14:09) If you have brand searches, people are specifically searching for you not generic advice.

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(14:48) Half of all searches on Google are branded searches.

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(17:29) People would argue online about how to pronounce “Ahrefs” so they got people around the world to say it into a camera and it generated a lot of buzz.

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(18:28) The accidental success of naming my company “Kopywriting Kourse” and how it allowed me to dominate a keyword. The K spelling was fun and weird, and the normal spelling was boring.

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(20:44) AppSumo and PostHog have fun brands that people like participating in.

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(21:23) How does social media affect SEO? SEO seems to be more permission marketing (they search then allow you to market to them), and social media is interruption marketing (you have to stand out).

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(25:55) Are social media and SEO merging? I think social media is a blog.

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(29:45) I’ve just been blanket posting everywhere, it’s very hard to track social media.

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(32:37) Almost everything they do at Ahrefs now is AI. Revenue has grown because of new AI tracking upgrades. But it has made the importance of “taste” grow.

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(35:17) Before I made web tools exactly like I wanted, but when I vibe code something AI decides on everything, which is great in some cases, but sometimes leads me astray. This is where taste comes in.

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(37:00) I always get this funny feeling when I build anything online, that it’ll be invalidated or useless in a short amount of time.

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(38:12) A lot of people start using AI but are stuck on the basic use cases for it, because they usually don’t even know what else it can do.

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(41:48) Ahrefs made a product called Agent A where the agent does everything for you.

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(43:40) Tim noticed I do all my podcast prep manually, and goes through how he made a system that does it all for him.

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(46:09) I sometimes need “Mental Ownership” of a something.

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(50:15) SwipeFile has grown thanks to AI because we can do soooo much more than just save cool swipes.

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(51:33) Surprisingly Ahrefs has almost never done traditional advertising.

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(52:50) MyFirstMillion did a competition for clipping their podcast and it resulted in millions of views.

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(53:56) They did a “Hire Yourself To Ahrefs” competition. Made people answer 3 questions, they got 200 applications, and is now head of partnerships.

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(55:19) The top way Ahrefs gets customers is still all inbound, they literally don’t have any outbound sales, even past $100m in revenue per year.

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(58:49) They stopped their affiliate program because the affiliates really didn’t put out that much value that Ahrefs couldn’t just do on their own, and it required so much small back and forth.

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(1:02:15) Ahrefs initially got traction by making free tools, then freemium model for tools. 8,000 paying customers and 16,000 free customers, but those people talked about Ahrefs a lot.

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(1:06:10) AI search result tracking is their fastest growing product Brand Radar.

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(1:07:18) For AEO the most important thing is how many times your brand is being mentioned.

• Watch the interview on ​YouTube​​
• Follow Tim Soulo on ​LinkedIn​, ​YouTube​ and ​Instagram​​​

Sincerely, Neville Medhora - ​SwipeFile​ / ​Kopywriting​