iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Ryan Law @thinking-slow.bsky.social · 07/02/2025

ChatGPT accounts for 50% of all attributable referral traffic from AI chatbots 👇 (and that climbs to 67% for the smallest websites)* so if you want to start thinking about LLMO/GEO, ChatGPT is where I would focus *data from new @ahrefs.bsky.social study of referral traffic to 3,000 websites

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Ryan Law @thinking-slow.bsky.social · 13/01/2025

there's bias here (the very nature of an "AI content survey" will attract people who are using AI), but still... wow. are you using AI in content marketing? are you NOT? i would love to hear about your experiences fill out this survey and have your say: ephbu45foaj.typeform.com/ahrefssurvey

ephbu45foaj.typeform.com

Take the Ahrefs AI content survey

Discover how AI is disrupting content marketing and SEO

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Ryan Law @thinking-slow.bsky.social · 13/01/2025

i think back to just a couple of years ago, and content marketing was something that could ONLY be done by skilled people. now, almost everyone is using generative AI in some capacity. what an insane change!

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Ryan Law @thinking-slow.bsky.social · 13/01/2025

wow—get 10 content marketers in a room, and 9 of them will be using AI. i'm looking at the early results of our survey this morning, and it's clear that AI is eating content marketing. i'm very bullish on AI, but the magnitude of this response has surprised me

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Ryan Law @thinking-slow.bsky.social · 10/01/2025

i'm aiming for a few hundred more responses before i analyze and write a full research report... and i'll share it with you, of course :) typeform link here: ephbu45foaj.typeform.com/ahrefssurvey

ephbu45foaj.typeform.com

Take our content survey :)

It only takes 5 minutes!

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Ryan Law @thinking-slow.bsky.social · 10/01/2025

if you have a few minutes spare, i would love to hear YOUR experience using (or not using!) generative AI in SEO and content marketing. we'll aggregate the data and report on exactly how AI is being used, how often, how good it is, and where content budget is being spent.

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Ryan Law @thinking-slow.bsky.social · 10/01/2025

i personally think AI content is being published FAR more than the public discourse suggests. i think tons of companies have quietly cut content spend and started publishing pure AI outputs. but i want DATA to back up my opinion! so we're running a research study on AI CONTENT

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Ryan Law @thinking-slow.bsky.social · 20/12/2024

inspired very heavily by my favourite wikipedia page: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-te...

en.wikipedia.org

Long-term nuclear waste warning messages - Wikipedia

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Ryan Law @thinking-slow.bsky.social · 18/12/2024

we spent $400,000 to bring you this guide to event marketing. remember our conference, Ahrefs Evolve? learning how to plan, promote and run a 500-attendee international event was a HUGE journey for our tiny events team. here's everything we learned: ahrefs.com/blog/event-m...

ahrefs.com

Event Marketing: The Ultimate Guide That Cost $400k to Make

The complete story of planning and running our first international conference (and how you can do it too—seriously).

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Ryan Law @thinking-slow.bsky.social · 17/12/2024

i need your help. generative AI is the biggest change to content marketing and SEO since the internet. at @ahrefs.bsky.social, we're researching how AI is really changing our industry if you have 5 minutes to spare, please fill out our survey: ephbu45foaj.typeform.com/to/krQzpc68 thank you :)

ephbu45foaj.typeform.com

Take our content survey :)

It only takes 5 minutes!

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Ryan Law @thinking-slow.bsky.social · 05/12/2024

i got chatgpt to write a chrome bookmarklet that copies all h2s/h3s from a page. took about 30 seconds to get it working. now i can copy to the clipboard all blog post titles from an index page, or all headers from an article. already used it like a dozen times. generative AI is amazing :)

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Ryan Law @thinking-slow.bsky.social · 04/12/2024

I went head-to-head with a marketing noob armed with ChatGPT to see who was the better marketer 😅 watch us create social posts, ad copy, and search-optimized blog posts... and then get blind-judged by two marketing pros live now on AhrefsTV: www.youtube.com/watch?v=QbBH...

youtube.com

We Put AI Against a 14-Year Digital Marketing Expert

YouTube video by Ahrefs

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Ryan Law @thinking-slow.bsky.social · 03/12/2024

ah very cool, hope you find something useful! i did some stuff like median clicks/impressions, let me know if you come up with any cool ideas :)

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Ryan Law @thinking-slow.bsky.social · 03/12/2024

no great surprises from this, but it does open the door to potentially interesting cohort analyses (clicks/links/impressions by business potential score etc) might be a fun exercise for a company very big into ToFu traffic or else struggling to generate customers from SEO/content marketing

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Ryan Law @thinking-slow.bsky.social · 03/12/2024

fun little thing we did recently: used AI to categorize our blog posts by their "business potential" score (i.e. 3 = our product is an irreplaceable solution to the problem; 0 = absolutely no way to mention our product) 77% scored high on business potential (2 or 3 BP)

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Ryan Law @thinking-slow.bsky.social · 29/11/2024

13/ i will leave you with two questions: what would i do if the diminishing returns of "traditional" SEO content came faster and harder than i expected? how would i attract attention, add value, and make people care about my company if i couldn't rely on simple information arbitrage to do the job?

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Ryan Law @thinking-slow.bsky.social · 29/11/2024

12/ some small percentage of "SEO content" has truly made the information landscape richer for its existence, but it's a very small percentage. from a user perspective, i think generative search is a good thing.

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Ryan Law @thinking-slow.bsky.social · 29/11/2024

11/ we are people who have something to lose in this situation, but if we put aside our biases, it's hard to see the emergence of generative search as a bad thing.

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Ryan Law @thinking-slow.bsky.social · 29/11/2024

10/ most SERPs are always, and have always, been crammed full of some mixture of irrelevant information, heavy-handed "marketing" content, or plain misinformation. generative search is often wrong, but so is traditional search—and generative search FEELS so much better. it will win. it is winning.

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Ryan Law @thinking-slow.bsky.social · 29/11/2024

9/ and what does "wrong" mean anyway? what are we drawing comparison to? compare the "wrongness" of generative search to the state of "traditional" search. we're wearing rose-tinted glasses.

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Ryan Law @thinking-slow.bsky.social · 29/11/2024

8/ the Google/Reddit partnership reinforces the point that vast amounts of content are created every day with no financial incentives whatsoever. these generative models will always have a vast corpus of cutting-edge discourse to imbibe. UGC is the leading edge for informational queries.

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Ryan Law @thinking-slow.bsky.social · 29/11/2024

7/ the remaining gaps and edge cases—niche topics, emerging topics, revisions to existing information—will be closed even if the monetary incentives for creating SEO content disappear overnight.

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Ryan Law @thinking-slow.bsky.social · 29/11/2024

6/ and the responses won't be "wrong" for very long. we've already seen that there is enough content in the world to train these models to a point of competence in many domains.

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Ryan Law @thinking-slow.bsky.social · 29/11/2024

5/ even when the information is wrong, it still sounds good enough to pass muster to most searchers. and unfortunately, that is the ultimate acid test by which the efficacy of any search experience is measured.

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Ryan Law @thinking-slow.bsky.social · 29/11/2024

4/ the experience of generative AI for search is already fantastic—objectively better than "old" Google Search. you can search for weird, complicated, nuanced questions and receive a perfectly contextual, customised response.

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Ryan Law @thinking-slow.bsky.social · 29/11/2024

3/ i think this "stripping" process is not instant, but i think the horse has already bolted. i really can see a world where almost all rote "informational" queries will be satisfied beautifully by generative AI.

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Ryan Law @thinking-slow.bsky.social · 29/11/2024

2/ obviously, that is exactly what AI Overviews does. Google is doing what Google has always done: watching to see where smart people find arbitrage opportunities in the SERP, and then—eventually—building something that strips out the arbitrage and removes the middleman.

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Ryan Law @thinking-slow.bsky.social · 29/11/2024

1/ thinking aloud: "SEO content" has historically acted as an aggregation layer for internet content. it pulled together information from disparate sources and made it accessible at the top of the SERP

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Reposted by Ryan Law

Cyrus Maxx @zyppy.com · 28/11/2024

So good.... "How to Become a Thought Leader in Just 6 Incredibly Difficult Steps" If you want to write for big blogs, speak on stage, sell a book, or grow your social media following, these 6 steps by Ryan Law @thinking-slow.bsky.social got your back ahrefs.com/blog/how-to-...

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Ryan Law @thinking-slow.bsky.social · 28/11/2024

ah too kind, thanks for checking it out/sharing! this was a very fun one to write :)

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Ryan Law @thinking-slow.bsky.social · 27/11/2024

so opening bluesky feels like slipping into a warm bath. didn't realise how much i missed old twitter :')

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