Tim Soulo 🇺🇦

CMO @Ahrefs // I tweet about our (fairly unconventional) approach to marketing... and a little bit about SEO. 🙂 // Born & raised in Ukraine 🇺🇦.

[Tim Soulo 🇺🇦 @timsoulo]

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.

[Tim Soulo 🇺🇦 @timsoulo]

@stefano_caioni 😢

[Tim Soulo 🇺🇦 @timsoulo]

I can't wait for people to read DISCOVERABLE (out 24th Nov)... So I printed the first page on the back of a t-shirt and wore it at Chiang Mai SEO conference.

Does everyone who saw it count as a reader? 🙃

[Tim Soulo 🇺🇦 @timsoulo]

@PaulKlayVC hope the prologue has a good hook to want to keep reading :)

[Tim Soulo 🇺🇦 @timsoulo]

@iamnazmulasif @ahrefs hope you'll enjoy the read! 🙏

[Tim Soulo 🇺🇦 @timsoulo]

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.

[Tim Soulo 🇺🇦 @timsoulo]

Did you also notice "fear, uncertainty & doubt messaging" prolifertating within our industry in the past couple years?

[Harpreet @harpreetchatha_]

AEO companies are not seeing their revenue grow as fast as it should. So they're cranking up the fear, uncertainty & doubt messaging out of desperation.

If you know numbers, the math isn't mathing.

- According to Ramp, Profound's adoption rate has barely increased since January.
- Airops is declining (enough said)
- Peec AI just hit $20m ARR (not bad considering they have raised $29m, financially probably best placed on this list)
- Clearscope collapsed (not surprised, go to their blog)
- Searchable reached $5m ARR but they're "valued at $85m" (their marketing tactics are borderline stupid) [linkedin ai slop]

There's probably a reason you don't hear the startup from New York talk about ARR.

A valuation is only useful if there's someone out there willing to pay that price.

As I said in past, there's also a big reason some companies that started as "AI prompt trackers" are moving into things outside of AI Search Optimization (like article spinning lol), ad agents, etc.

Not scientific or investment advice, but this is AI search optimization advice.

Choose the people you decide to learn about search, & help your business grow from search wisely.

[Tim Soulo 🇺🇦 @timsoulo]

https://t.co/QYmRACsOdD

[Tim Soulo 🇺🇦 @timsoulo]

This is me looking excited, because I just received the very first copies of my book DISCOVERABLE in the mail.

I used to tell everyone it took me 2 years to write this book, but then I opened the revision history of the Google Doc where I started it... and it was 4 years old. 🤯

There's a famous saying that "Writing is thinking."

Well, in those 4 years that I've been working on this book (on and off), I spent hundreds of hours thinking about marketing and refining my understanding of its very fundamentals

It's not a book about SEO...

And it's not a book about tricks & tactics that work in 2026 (but will likely become irrelevant in 2027).

It's a book that teaches you HOW TO DO GREAT MARKETING and get discovered by thousands of customers.

The ideas and principles from this book are what helped us grow @Ahrefs to a $150M+ ARR business, without taking a single dollar from investors and always keeping our team super small.

And they're perfectly applicable to any other business, whether it's a flower shop or a SaaS project.

If you follow me here to learn marketing, there's no better way than reading this book.

It comes out November 24th, but you can already pre-order it

It would mean a lot to me if you do. 🙏

Link below 👇

[Glen Allsopp 👾 @ViperChill]

Today, we (Ahrefs) are releasing a preview of DR4: a new Domain Rating model for scoring backlink profiles.

Your own DR may change, so we're sharing two ways you can check before it rolls out on December 1st.

The two main changes:

1. Subdomains now have their own rating, so our help desk (DR 75) is scored differently than our root domain (DR 92)

2. The pool of domains impacting DR has essentially halved, to ~132M.

In our testing, DR4's correlation with Google rankings across all hosts is more than 2.5x stronger than our current model.

We've been analyzing the data for weeks and have already had some great outside feedback, but I'm sure there will be more.

That's why I'm opening up a direct feedback form for a short period of time.

I'll go through all of the comments myself and pass on what I see with the rest of the team.

We're pretty excited about finally sharing this with more people. 🙏

Link in the first reply

[Tim Soulo 🇺🇦 @timsoulo]

This should be a good conversation!

Tune in!

[JH Scherck @JHTScherck]

I opened my big mouth and now I have to defend how we do prompt tracking to @timsoulo and @dejanseo

I will likely get corncobbed into oblivion, but I stand by our prompt framework and will share it with everyone who attends:
https://t.co/u0vUFw2o6g

[Tim Soulo 🇺🇦 @timsoulo]

Looking for marketing agencies (& solo consultants) to test the "Alpha" version of @Ahrefs' brand new product: Mentions Explorer. 👀

The deal is same as always:

We give you free access to the tool, and you send us a screencast video with your first impressions from using it (within 48-72hrs).

Drop a comment if you're interested and we'll DM you.

(we need around 20 "alpha" users at this time)

P.S.

You need to have at least a FREE account at @Ahrefs to allow us to activate this new tool for you.

P.P.S.
While the tool stays in alpha/beta, we're happy to renew your access every month in exchange to feedback on how to improve it.

[Tim Soulo 🇺🇦 @timsoulo]

In this 3-minute clip, @nireyal explains how good marketing shapes the way customers experience your product:

"Good advertising doesn't just tell the user about the product, it incepts how the user should enjoy and experience that product."
- Nir Eyal

"Pay your marketers more."
- Tim Soulo

[Tim Soulo 🇺🇦 @timsoulo]

@RossHudgens great work, mate!

[Tim Soulo 🇺🇦 @timsoulo]

@danielcorteseo @ahrefs I have one chapter that's about Search in general..

my book is about the fundamental principles of marketing, not specific strategies of showing up in AI search

but if you're interested in this topic, there are a few good books about it too

[Tim Soulo 🇺🇦 @timsoulo]

The pre-order bonuses for DISCOVERABLE are worth ~200x more than the book itself...

- A free audiobook.
- 1 month trial of Ahrefs' Brand Radar ($800+ value).
- A chance to win 1 of 20 tickets to @Ahrefs Evolve 2027 ($700+ value).
- Weekly live Q&A call with me to tackle some hot marketing questions.

...and the book itself is just $7.99 for the Kindle version. 🤷

This offer is so good that I started asking myself:

*Why do we even do this?*

Why nudge you guys to buy the book early?

Well, authors typically do this to drive a large volume of sales on the release week and get the "bestseller" status for their book.

But the "bestseller" status will barely impress anyone these days. With a good coordinated launch, ANY book can be a bestseller (which is why there are so many of them). So that's not very important to me.

What I genuinely care about is for you folks to ACTUALLY READ THE BOOK!

It took me 4 years to write it (on and off). And I lost count of the drafts, the revisions and the hours I spent working on it. I wasn't going to put my name on anything less than the best book I could write.

So when the draft was finally ready, I couldn't wait for someone to read it.

That's where the urgency is coming from. And that's why we're being so generous with the pre-order bonuses.

I simply CAN'T WAIT for you to read DISCOVERABLE and tell me what you think.

Pre-order your copy here: https://t.co/DJYLv9ayLh

P.S. That impatience is also why we decided to self-publish it. I just didn't want to wait another 6-8 months for a publisher to go through their process.

[Tim Soulo 🇺🇦 @timsoulo]

@nathanbarry absolutely devastating...

[Tim Soulo 🇺🇦 @timsoulo]

My 4 biggest takeaways on why marketing matters more than you think, from talking to Nir Eyal, NYT bestselling author of Hooked, Indistractable, and Beyond Belief.

▪️ 1. Your marketing doesn't just promote the product. It changes how people experience it.

Toyota and GM once sold the exact same car off the same production line. The Toyota was rated one of the top cars in America. The GM version ended up near the bottom. Same car, same specs, same materials. The only difference was the logo on the hood, and what people believed because of it.

▪️ 2. Your brand isn't a layer on top of the product. It's part of the product.

Liquid Death is water from Virginia in a can. No health claims, no special source. But the punk rock branding, the skull logo, the "Murder Your Thirst" attitude — that's what people are buying. The brand created an identity people want to belong to. That identity IS the product.

▪️ 3. Premium pricing doesn't just capture value, it creates it.

In a Stanford study, people drank the same wine with different price labels. The "expensive" wine didn't just seem better — fMRI showed more activity in the brain's pleasure centers. The price was the only variable, and it was enough to change the taste.

▪️ 4. Even when people KNOW it's marketing, it still works.

A Harvard researcher gave patients pills literally labeled "placebo" and told them it was nothing. Many of them got the same relief as the actual prescription medication. Some called back asking for more. Which means that you can think of your marketing claims as a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Watch full episode here: https://t.co/4IZwUP7FNa

[Glen Allsopp 👾 @ViperChill]

Here’s a prompt I love for finding the most-linked-to content across dozens of sites at once.

(Not to copy anyone, but to get inspiration for your own efforts.)

"For these 20 [finance] sites, pull live crawled pages tagged as ‘Research’. Remove anything that isn’t an article, then use Batch Analysis to rank them by referring domains."

You can provide the sites yourself, or ask ChatGPT/Claude/etc. to pull organic competitors via the Ahrefs API.

For some sites, opinion pieces pick up the most links.

In industries with a lot of SaaS companies, you'll see a ton of original tools and research.

Check content sites in the beauty or fashion space, and you'll likely learn more about the research they report on rather than create.

Start small to make sure you're happy with the results.

On our cheapest plan with API/MCP access (Lite), you could check ~30K URLs this way if you only pull back referring domains, which could be hundreds of sites depending on how much they cover that specific page type.

Of course, not all links are created equal, so you can play around with different filters.

AI is then really good at finding commonalities, excluding topics you've already covered, and highlighting anything you might have unique insights on.

As I say, the goal isn’t to copy anyone, but to get inspiration on ways you can make something great.

Hopefully this is useful. Please let me know if you would like to see more of these 🙏

[Tim Soulo 🇺🇦 @timsoulo]

Guess which US state we've picked for @Ahrefs Evolve 2027...?

[Tim Soulo 🇺🇦 @timsoulo]

My latest guest on the @Ahrefs Podcast is Nir Eyal (@nireyal), NYT bestselling author of Hooked, Indistractable, and Beyond Belief.

The key idea we discussed on the pod was how good marketing doesn't merely promote the product, but it literally changes how people experience it.

Nir calls it the experience loop: Believe → Anticipate → Feel → Confirm.

From there we got into how our beliefs shape our careers and relationships:

- how the labels we put on ourselves become cages,
- why venting about your boss makes things worse,
- and why manifesting your goals literally makes you less likely to achieve them.

Watch the full episode on YouTube:

https://t.co/KsKxMNTO5v

(it's also on Apple and Spotify)

...and don't forget to support me with likes/comments if you're enjoying the conversations on Ahrefs Podcast (this means a lot to me).

[Tim Soulo 🇺🇦 @timsoulo]

link to the job opening:

https://t.co/u3L24lGJwh

[Tim Soulo 🇺🇦 @timsoulo]

Last year, I interviewed a dozen copywriters for a role at @Ahrefs. Only one could tell me which books, frameworks, courses or thought leaders they'd studied to get better at their craft.

I posted about it on LinkedIn and it blew up. 545 comments.

Most people agreed with me...

Some others told me to just "judge the work," which I don't actually disagree with. Some people are just naturally very talented at putting ideas into words, without neccessarily knowing how they do it. 🤷

But even among those natural talents, many of them still take time to study the craft. And I'd argue those are the best of the bunch.

Now...

It's been 17 months since that post, and AI has gotten seriously good at writing copy.

Which definitely raised the bar of what "average" looks like...

But it didn't magically turn OK copywriters into AMAZING ones. (At least not from what I've seen.)

That being said...

We're looking for an AMAZING copywriter to join our team at Ahrefs.

Specifically, for the role of "Brand Communications Manager."

[Job posting linked in comments.]

If you know someone who would be a great fit for us, please tag them below. 🙏

Other than that...

Any help spreading the word to help us find an AMAZING copywriter is greatly appreciated! 🙏