In the last 6 months at @Ahrefs, we analyzed over 1 billion data points across 14 studies. Here's what we learned about AI search optimization:
1) "Best X" blog listicles are the single most prominent content format cited by AI chatbots. They make up 43.8% of all page types cited by ChatGPT specifically.
2) 67% of ChatGPT's top 1,000 citations come from sources marketers can't influence: Wikipedia (29.7%), homepages (23.8%), app stores (6.6%). Only 32.3% are influenceable content like educational pages, reviews, news, and blog posts.
3) 28.3% of ChatGPT's most-cited pages have zero Google organic visibility. These pages get cited repeatedly by ChatGPT despite not ranking in Google at all. A completely separate discovery layer.
4) ChatGPT only cites about 50% of the URLs it retrieves. It fetches dozens of pages per query but uses half as background context without attribution. This means that being retrieved and being cited are very different things.
5) Adding schema markup had zero meaningful impact on AI citations. AI Overviews actually dipped −4.6%, while AI Mode (+2.4%) and ChatGPT (+2.2%) showed changes indistinguishable from zero.
6) YouTube mentions have the highest correlation (0.737) with AI brand visibility out of all the factors we studied (including all the conventional SEO metrics like backlinks, page count, DR, etc). This held true for both Google-owned and OpenAI products.
7) AI Overviews reduce clicks to the #1 result by 58%. That’s up from 34.5% just 10 months earlier. The trend is accelerating.
8) 99.9% of AI Overviews appear on informational intent queries. Transactional, navigational, and local searches are almost entirely AIO-free. Shopping triggers AIOs just 3.2% of the time.
9) For a given search query, Google’s AI Mode and AI Overviews reach the same conclusions 86% of the time — but cite almost entirely different sources (only 13.7% citation overlap).
10) AI Overviews change every 2.15 days on average, with 70% of content differing between consecutive observations. But semantic similarity stays at 0.95. The words, sources, and entities constantly shuffle, but the actual meaning barely moves.
I think the main thing AI has taught me, through all the time savings it brings, is that I’m not a very interesting person
Faced with a surplus of free time, I realize I don’t really have hobbies besides content consumption
I’m forced to conclude that I don’t have very deep friendships, and am not a core member of any particular community
I’m not very cultured, I’m finding, and don’t have abiding interests in art or literature or history or much that isn’t directly related to my work
I have a work-centric life, in other words. AI pulls back the curtain on just how impoverished such an existence is, by disabusing me of its necessity
Given the freedom I’ve always said I wanted, I’m at a loss as to what to do with it, except plow myself even harder into work, thus exacerbating the lesson
There’s nothing more confronting to humans than freedom
The weirdest thing yet discovered by physics is not that the world is 4-dimensional but that its geometry is Lorentzian. That it is curved is prosaic by comparison. So are Entanglement and the multiverse.
Bagi yang baru2 nak bisnes ni, peganglah 3 pesanan ini:
1) Bisnes adalah tentang manusia
2) Bisnes adalah tentang cash flow
3) Bisnes adalah tentang menjual
Elok tiga benda tu, eloklah bisnes kita.
Selain daripada itu hanyalah tambahan extra dan bonus, bukan yang utama.
@awscloud , why my RDS usage has shot way up over two weeks (i need to increase from t2.medium to t3.2xlarge for two of my RDS) but i see no increase in usage of our services and consumption pattern over the same period? Are you throttling my server so that i increase the tier?
A paradox of life is that the greatest returns come in the long-term, but the opportunity cost of moving slowly is huge.
Long-term thinking is not slow acting.
Act fast on things that compound. Never let a day pass without doing something that will benefit you in a decade.
How about some nerd stats for #BlackFriday2019 with @ShopifyEng?
128,000 Unicorn workers served 90m unique sessions at a steady 17M RPM (requests/min) throughout the day. Over 1b webhooks sent, transformed 280m webp images at the edge and 34b requests to CDNs. 74m Flows ran.
dear lazyweb, this diagram is often credited to Jeff Bezos -- "on the back of a napkin" -- in 2001. Anyone have additional details / links to the context in which it was created?
After months of work, dozens of interviews, and countless hours – I'm very excited to release part one of a truly epic research project I've been quietly working on: "How to Kickstart and Scale a Marketplace Business"
More context below (1/8) 👇
https://t.co/ghYCKOmrB5
So many software companies are stuck on a ticket treadmill working a never-ending backlog. When those companies look at Basecamp, they think, "this can't work for software development?!", because it's not a ticket feeder. Heads explode when I tell them we do everything in BC...
@david_perell Seneca called this thousands of years ago:
"If you apply yourself to study you will avoid boredom with life….you will attract many to be your friends and the finest people will flock to you."
Twenty years ago this month, PayPal found product-market fit. I remember the moment vividly because it’s a dramatic example of a strategy that still works today. I call it “going Sharp.” I write more about it here:
https://t.co/FsVEIiraYF
LAUNCH: Today we launch Basecamp Personal - a completely free version of Basecamp designed with freelancers, students, families, and personal projects in mind. Use it for hobbies, weddings, small events, side projects, volunteer gigs, etc. Here you go: https://t.co/h6hSrHoilc
Romantic wife sent her husband a loving text:
“If u are sleeping send me your dreams. If u are laughing send me your smile. If u are eating send me a bite. If u are crying send me your tears. I love you”
The unromantic hubby texted back:
“I am on the toilet. Please advise”