3 Unrelated Stories About AI & Writing Tell The Same Story
I stumbled upon three separate articles about writing and AI in the same week, each from a completely different angle, and all describing the same thing. A novelist turned MIT writing lecturer confronting students who outsourced their essays to AI. A new Graphite study showing AI-generated articles now make up roughly half of all new […]
Organic traffic is still worth tracking — just not all of it
HubSpot changed the name of its flagship conference from INBOUND to UNBOUND. This wasn’t a casual rebrand. It reflected a broader shift away from legacy SEO strategies built around top-of-funnel traffic. Modern search is shifting closer to a zero-click environment: The click-through rate curve is collapsing. We know that roughly 60% of searches now end […]
Velocity: What the Googlers not on stage said at I/O 2026
For a first-time attendee, Google I/O’s energetic, optimistic atmosphere felt almost like a coronation. Last year’s bets are now growth pillars because they worked. Ask Maps became the playbook for rolling out Ask YouTube. Gemini 3.5 Flash powers Antigravity — think Claude Code, but Google — and Googlers are already using it to build the […]
Google’s AI search guidance is naive and self-serving
Every time Google ships a new Search Central document, two camps in our industry move at the speed of light. The first camp screenshots their favorite paragraph, posts it to LinkedIn with “SEE? IT’S JUST SEO” in the caption, and goes back to doing exactly what they were already doing. The second camp screenshots a […]
Yes, you need to use AI, but you need to use it strategically
I’ve attended many AI conferences and training events over the past few years. I’ve seen people doing innovative work, but I’ve also seen many spinning their wheels. After working hands-on with AI automation across multiple businesses, I’ve done both. So I want to share what I’ve learned to help you avoid wasting time, energy, and […]
Google launches AI Performance Insights and Conversational Attributes in Merchant Center
Google is introducing new Merchant Center tools designed to help retailers improve visibility across AI-powered shopping experiences as announced today at Google Marketing Live 2026. Driving the news. The company announced AI Performance Insights, a new reporting feature that helps merchants understand how their brand performs across AI surfaces. The tool compares a brand’s share of […]
7 Ways to Automate Content Marketing with Agent A
I run the Ahrefs blog team, and each week we use Agent A to automate more and more of the tedious parts of our work. Writing formulaic SEO content, updating old articles, reporting on blog performance, even running complicated performance analyses… these are all things Agent A does for me. Here are some of our favorite Agent […]
What Is Content Engineering, and How Do You Do It?
A content writer creates a blog post. A content strategist decides which topics to cover. A content engineer designs the systems that produce content and make it discoverable by humans and AI. In this post, I’ll cover what content engineering actually is, its core components, whose responsibility it is, and how you can become a fully-fledged […]
What Is Agentic SEO? And How to Get Started This Week
Agentic AI feels a bit like logging onto the internet in its early day, or discovering social media around 2007. There’s that same sense that something big is shifting, even if it’s not fully clear yet. It’s just a completely new way of working, also for SEOs. Instead of building every step of an SEO workflow yourself—like […]
AI Agents for SEO: What They Are, How They Work, and How to Build One
Most SEO teams have tried AI. Not many have tried AI agents. This article covers what AI SEO agents actually do in practice, which tools are worth knowing about, how to build your own, and what the people building them have learned the hard way. What is an AI SEO agent? An AI SEO agent is software […]