Google launched AI Mode for all US users and most SEOs are panicking for the wrong reasons.
Yes, click-through rate and overall traffic is dropping across websites. Yes, this is the biggest search change ever.
But looking across tons of client sites, the pattern is obvious.
Sites with strong topical authority and EEAT signals are actually GAINING AI citations.
They’re increasing brand visibility and trust, which instantly leads to more qualified traffic.
Here’s the truth: AI Mode isn't killing SEO. It's killing bad SEO.
Four immediate changes I'm making for all clients:
1. Topic clusters over keywords
We're auditing content for comprehensive subject coverage, not individual keyword targeting. If you can't cover a topic completely with related articles, don't bother starting. AI Mode rewards sites that become the definitive resource.
2. Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)
Instead of optimizing for what users type, we're targeting the questions AI asks itself during query processing. This means structured content with clear headers, detailed explanations, and supporting evidence AI can easily parse and cite.
3. Multi-step reasoning content
AI Mode uses "query fan-out techniques" that trigger hundreds of parallel searches from one user question. We're building content that anticipates and answers these follow-up queries within the same piece.
4. Securing authority-building backlinks
EEAT signals are critical for AI citations, and that starts with your link profile. We're focusing exclusively on high-authority, niche-relevant sites that signal expertise to Google's AI systems.
We've adapted to core updates and just about every algorithm shift Google's thrown at us.
AI Mode is just the latest challenge.
SEOs dreading the annual title & h1 tag updates from 2024 to 2025, did you even know there’s a way to update all your tags in less than an hour?
I recently released a tool that makes those title & h1 updates insanely fast!
Curious? Check out the demo https://t.co/prmRbheheW
JUST LAUNCHED! 🚀
The SEO productivity tool that I’ve been quietly developing over the last 3+ years is finally open for public beta users.
https://t.co/8KFJmsdyiT
Whoa, this article shows how SEOs can use Screaming Frog's Embedding Extraction + Google Collab to identify related pages at scale:
This is a really great article from Gus Pelogia that showcases how you can use Screaming Frog to create embeddings for each page on your site. The embeddings serve as numeric representations of the page. You can then compare use these values to understand what pages on your site are related to each other:
To run this process, you'll need to perform the following process:
This is a HUGE feature add for @ahrefs .
"Content Changes" automatically detects page changes so you can see how they impacted organic traffic:
No more needing to go back to the Wayback Machine to see how a page has changed over time. This feature will detect when there have been significant updates to a given page. If there have, it notes it as a green annotation beneath a traffic graph. This allows you to easily see how your changes or competitors are impacting organic traffic to a given page.
What's more is that you can actually go in and see what the change were. You'll be able to get a side-by-side comparison of how the content changed between versions. Extremely helpful for figuring out if a competitor made significant adjustments that improved traffic.
SHOCK!!! 😱
Rand Fishkin (@randfish) ruthlessly schools Tim Soulo on the topic of MARKETING ATTRIBUTION!!
Seriously though... 🙂
Those are (arguably) the best 4 minutes 38 seconds on the topic of "marketing attribution" that you have ever seen.
Check it out!
(...and consider checking out the full episode of Ahrefs Podcast)
*Generalized* SEO investment model that I built for an upcoming course.
- Content continues to rise in value over time.
- Link acquisition is high in value for early-stage companies.
- Technical SEO starts very high and drops sharply until companies approach enterprise stages.
Here is how to find your biggest SEO opportunities in less than 60 seconds.
@LogansNotions created a Google Sheets template that utilizes a metric called available clicks to help you prioritize your SEO efforts.
This gives you a simple way to start your analysis process without having to sift through all of the metrics in GA4 & GSC.
Hey SEO friends! Come and listen to me rant... what's in it for you?? You'll get to hear my Available Clicks prioritization process.
That's right... we actually talked about actionable stuff here.
#PODCAST#COMINGSOON
Coming soon to the Recipe for SEO Success podcast: Easy SEO testing tactics: How to get better results with @LogansNotions (NEWBIE).
Subscribe on ITUNES: https://t.co/iIsONzsQ4r
Or STITCHER: https://t.co/5cnEgHqyEl
Or SPOTIFY: https://t.co/lCuJTmHA8h
Keyword clustering in @ahrefs is INSTANT! ⚡️
You don't need to upload the list of keywords and wait ⌛️ until they will be organised into clusters.
Here at Ahrefs we've already done all the "clustering" on the backend!
So you can put your "seed" keyword in and hundreds of thousands of search queries containing that keyword will be grouped into clusters INSTANTLY!
Check out the quick vid I made: