Patrick Stox vs Ryan Law - Ahrefs Use Cases Showdown

[music] Fire. ladies and gentlemen, WELCOME BACK TO the ATF's Use case showdown. You're watching live from screens across the globe, the second edition of us uh bringing us two marketing titans to face off WITH THEIR MOST SPECTACULAR USE cases on our platform. I am your host Constants and tonight you are not just spectators. Tonight you are the judges AND YOU WILL CROWN THE CHAMPION AND YOU WILL BE TAKING away amazing ways HFS can superpower your marketing. Okay, let me introduce you to today's combatants. First, fighting out of the red corner, he's lead author for the SEO chapter of the web alac Almanac 2021 and he's defined the role of SEO for the US Department of Labor. He's run the ever su successful Riley SEO meetup, beer and SEO meetup, and an online technical SEO slack group with J.R. Oaks and Paul Shapiro. He is a product advisor, technical SEO, and brand ambassador here at HRS. Give it up for Patrick Socks. Let me hear your audience if you're team Patrick today. Let's see your reactions. Make some noise. Yeah, that's right. Patrick, do you have any words for your opponent and the crowd tonight? Yeah, they call him Mariah and Law, but today I'm the one making the rules. He's a featherweight scribbler. I'm the heavyweight king. What's the British boy with a keyboard going to do in the ring? Oh, damn. [laughter] Those are those are some I'm leaving immediately. I'm not standing for this. I'm sorry. [laughter] Oh, that's incredible. And now fighting out of the blue corner. This man has spent 14 years in the content marketing trenches. He's been a writer, a content strategist, a team lead, marketing director, VP, a CMO, and agency co-founder. He has helped to scale animals to 130 full-time employees and drove their blog to 2 million monthly page views. And he's helped to house brand names like GoDaddy, Zapier, and Clear Bit improve their content marketing and SEO. And he's a judge for the International Content Marketing Awards and now the director of content marketing at Hrefs. Ladies and gentlemen, the man who turned content marketing into A SCIENCE YET WRITES LIKE it's an art. Ryan Law, go me. Yeah. Team Ryan, show this man some love. Make some noise. [clears throat] That's a good number of claps. I like that. Ryan, do you have any words for our audience and your opponent tonight? Uh, sometimes people ask me, Ryan, isn't it dangerous to box with glasses on? And I say, "I have no idea. No one's ever managed to hit me." So, Patrick, you got your work cut out for you today, [laughter] my friend. That's so awesome. All right, guys. Let me break down the rules of engagement. This showdown consists of three rounds. In round one, each fighter will present two use cases. Each the first fighter will share both use cases, followed by the second fighter. And after both fighters have presented, you the audience will vote on your favorite use cases. And whoever whoever's use cases receive the most votes wins the round. In round two, we do it again. Two more use cases from each fighter. And then we vote again to see who wins that round. And then round three, the final round. Each fighter will present just one use case, their final knockout punch, their most powerful tactic that will blow their competition out of the water. And at the end of the three rounds, the fighter with the most winning use cases will be crowned the second HF's use case showdown champion. And the loser has pledged to donate $500 to a charity of the winner's choice. Now that we know how it's going to go down, it's time to kick things off. Patrick and Ryan, are you ready? Yeah. Yes. [laughter] Audience, are you ready? [cheering] Then let's get it on. Round one. Patrick Stark steps up to the plate first. Uh, show us what you got. You got 10 minutes to present your first two use cases. The floor is yours. You can go ahead and start sharing your screen. Yep. Got it. All right, first use case. You can use HRES for a lot of forecasting. Uh this is important for getting buy in. If you're doing any kind of planning, if you're just trying to get resources, if you're trying to upsell your clients, you can be like, "Hey, look, uh so and so, they're outpacing us. They're going to keep running away. I got these three things I want to do. I need $3,000 more dollars a month from you." Guess what? They'll do it every time. and no one wants to lose to their competitors. Uh so I wrote this blog a while back. There are a bunch of scripts there, but you don't have to do that. You can also just uh I'm going to show you how to do this very easily now. Uh because I'm a Python nerd. I wrote a bunch of stuff. But now you can just use our MCP and just ask claw to do all this or whatever you're using. Uh if you didn't know, we actually have the GSC data. The whole history is stored. This is in the API totally free for everyone. So this was my prompt. I just asked it for it and it output me a forecast. Kind of amazing. So this is the forecast of my GSC data. Where HF shines though is third party data. Like I ain't got Sim Rush's GSSE. I kind of wish but uh don't have it. But you can now like use the HF data to get anyone's forecast. So this is like me versus some of the competitors. And again like if I'm like they're they're winning, they're they're pulling away. They're going to dominate us. very easy to argue like I need more resources. I need to hire someone. I need more money every month. I want to do these like these projects. This is what's going to like close the gap. So, it's extremely powerful. Um you can even uh forecast like improvements on your content. Again, this is the prompt I used. Uh these will all go out later. [snorts] Uh we have what is called a custom click-through rate curve. This is your click-through rate based on your GSC data, not industry things that are way behind that haven't been updated in years. Uh all before like AI overviews that are like, oh yeah, position one gets 30 some% of clicks. Yeah, not really anymore. Not a thing. So this is a custom curve. Uh it's in the GSC report, but you can also pull this right in. So my clawed prompt just pulled this right in. And it's like, hey, look, if you here are pages that uh I lost a bunch of traffic on on this site over the last year or so, uh if I just gain like two positions each, I get like 1.6 million traffic. Insane. That's a very easy sell. It's a great thing to show to clients like these are the top 10 things I need to go work on. I need to go improve. If I rank better, we're going to get this much traffic. You could make this even more powerful. If you have some conversion numbers, some revenue numbers, put a monetary number on it, like, hey, this is going to be worth $7 million if I just work on these 10 pages and gain like two positions. Insane. Insanely. They're not You're asking 5,000, 10,000 a month. They're going to be like, "Yeah, absolutely. I'll pay you 120K to get $7 million back. Sounds great." Uh, you can even do this with like new content. So Ryan uh surprise I stole uh our upcoming blog posts and this is basically the uplift that we can expect. So based on uh the where similar blog posts are ranking on hrefs, this is basically what I expect each of those posts to get. Uh so roughly about 24,600 uh uplift from the blogs, the 32 blogs that we have in our pipeline. Now some of those you can see are like data studies or they're like uh thought leadership. They're not really going to get much traffic or anything. Uh I mean they will but like more from social and like people coming to the blog. They're not going to get search traffic. They'll get us a lot of links though and mentions in AI but not necessarily rank in Google. like people don't really search for our data studies, but for the ones that do, yeah, about 24,000 is the uplift I'm expecting. Kind of cool, right? Um, second use case, custom scorecards. Again, I I actually have a bunch of scripts and stuff from this old uh article on enterprise SEO, and you can see my output there, and it's uh it's kind of just an Excel dump. [laughter] It's cool that like you have that data, but I would never present that to a client in that way. Uh what's fun again, here's the prompt I used in Clawude and I just had it create this nice dashboard for me. Uh so it is literally just going out and comparing me versus competitors. It even threw in a radar chart. I didn't even ask for that, but look at that. It's like yeah, you're stronger in AI citations, but like they have more traffic. Traffic value is about the same. Uh very very cool, very easy to do. So I'm a huge fan on reporting. I know how uh much buy in you can get for again more resources, more money. Um this is the kind of thing that is next level. This is the kind of thing like I want to show a client. I want to show a stakeholder. Uh because this is it looks beautiful. It's not an Excel dump like my previous ones. Um and you can do this in multiple ways too. So like this is just a basic you know comparison but like what if I want to see what happened in the last 6 months? Who's progressing? who's regressing, do I need to make changes? Do I need to make a strategy change? This is what a lot of like QBRs and stuff in enterprise are about is do I need to shift something? How are we doing? Um, and this is your time to shine. You can do this, you know, year over year, last two years, however you want to do it. And you just take this and you're like, okay, uh, you know, our traffic is going down, theirs is going up. That's a problem. We got to change something. Something's not working. What did we do wrong? what what can we do better? And yeah, there's so many ways to use these types of scorecards. You could literally do uh authors like you use portfolios, create author scorecards, different business units. You could do it by country, what countries are overperforming, what countries are underperforming, and even different types of content. So like how is our you know uh how are our thought leadership things going? How are ourformational content? How are our like listicles doing? How are our data studies doing? So like you can kind of get an overall view of the different content types and figure out maybe I need to invest more there a little less here. Uh and that's it. That's going to be it for round one for me. All right. I'm gonna go ahead and take over to share here. Patrick comes swinging with a technical double punch. But the question is, will Pat will Ryan be able to reply with a counterattack? [bell] Ryan, the ring is yours. You got 10 minutes on the clock. Show us what you have to respond. You can take over the share. We got it. And we got it, right, Patrick? I love you, man, but too complicated. Nobody knows what a script is. Nobody knows what APIs are. My goodness, what world you living in, man? We need simple use cases, dashboards, easy peasy stuff that you can apply to good effect. That is what I'm delivering here today. So, we're going to kick things off. I'm going to embrace my heel turn. What could be more evil than AI generated content? So at HFS we are experimenting a bit more with AI generated content. Lots of the latest models from Claude from ChatBT are pretty good. You can use skills. You can generally get very good outputs from them. But you probably have bosses or CMOs or people that are still a little bit reluctant, a little bit reticent to actually create AI content. This report here will help you not only persuade your bosses that AI content is probably a fairly safe thing to do. It will also help you build out a strategy of topics that you can actually safely uh target with AI generated content. And that is all thanks to the lovely top pages report and the uh fairly recently added AI content level column. So you've probably seen this classic report uh one of my favorites. This is basically uh for any domain you look at an ordered list of the pages that are getting the most estimated organic traffic. This is obviously an amazing report. You can see exactly which articles, which keywords are performing best for any company you care about and you know maybe create your own version of those. Now the thing I really like doing now is combining it with this AI content level column. So we have built our own proprietary in-house uh AI text analysis model, AI detection model uh and you can access it right here in the top pages report. We will save the page content of these pages and run it through our AI content detector and give you a an estimate of whether or not that page was created with AI and even which parts of it were created with AI. And the thing I love about this is we are looking at articles that are currently performing well. They are ranking. They're generating traffic and with some measure of confidence, we can say they're probably AI generated as well. So, not picking on Jasper particularly, but they are an AI content company, so you'd expect them to use AI content. But straight away, we can see an article press release examples. They are generating real traffic for it. They've got a decent number of ranking keywords and very high estimated AI content level. And not only can you see that conceptually and maybe build out a list of topics across lots of websites with AI friendly topics that maybe you would want to try generating yourself, you can actually see how they've done it. Uh you can actually look if we go to the AI detector tab, you can actually see how the different parts of the article have been flagged and even in some cases which model we estimate was used to generate it. So, if you're trying to persuade your boss or your CMO or something like that that AI content is a safe thing to do, that maybe you want to dip a toe in the water, this is probably a pretty cool starting point to look at. This is something I did to build up my own confidence in actually creating AI content. Okay, cool. Right, number two. So Patrick briefly alluded to this portfolios. It's a very simple feature that can be used in lots and lots and lots of very interesting, very clever ways. Uh site explorer is basically the beating heart of HFS. You can obviously look at a ton of performance metrics for basically any website, any subfolder within that website, any subdomain, any individual page. But what if you want to look at the performance of a group, a subset of pages within that website? Or you want to look at multiple different websites and compare them directly in one group. Or you want to try and look at an entire industry and see how a bunch of the biggest companies around have all been impacted by the recent Google update. That kind of thing. That is exactly what portfolios is fantastic for doing. Um so I use this all the time. Basically you can select uh a bunch of URLs. You can individually specify which URLs you would like to analyze, group them together in a portfolio and see all these familiar amazing metrics you would always see in site explorer but just applied to that group of URLs. So we were recently talking about uh how is our 2025 SEO content performing relative to years previous. We made some changes to editorial process. We wanted to try and analyze these different cohorts and see how they performed. Well, portfolios makes that very easy. This is a portfolio of just our 2025 blog posts. We can see specific metrics like backlinks, organic traffic, keywords just for this group of articles. Super super useful. Uh if you want to publish some AI content, maybe you want to track the performance of that isolated from other articles you create as well. Build a portfolio, monitor the performance of those individually and see if they differ to other non-AI generated pages on your website as well. Uh something I do obviously I run a blog team with multiple writers. I ask everyone the blog team to manage their own portfolio of their own articles they create. Uh Louise kind enough here to monitor some of the articles she's written and published. And it's very easy once a month for us to come and look at these, see how they're performing together, identify some articles we'd like to fix or prioritize updating, that kind of thing. And I actually came across this doing my homework for this. Uh back when parasite SEO was a big trendy thing and people were worried that these sites were going to get tanked, I actually built a portfolio of the specific domains that people were referencing most often as the biggest parasite SEO uh websites and you can see exactly what happened to their uh traffic in aggregate. So this is not one website, this is all of these websites. You can basically see the trajectory of this entire strategy. uh performing very very well before Google brought the banhammer down and basically made this not work for these specific domains. And there's even some cool stuff you can do with like uh AB testing. If you want to try adding like a new widget to an article and see how that improves organic performance or you want to add like a what is section, you can do it to a subset of posts and track it versus another subset that doesn't have that. super powerful, super simple, and no need for the merchant of complexity stuff that Patrick was sharing with his scripts. I'm sorry to say it. That's all from me. [laughter] And that's the counter attack from Ryan. I'll go ahead and take over from you now. One second. Okay. So, what a response from Ryan. There are four incredible use cases, two completely different approaches, but only one fighter can win this round. AUDIENCE, IT IS TIME TO VOTE. On your screen, you'll soon see a poll pop up with voting options. Vote for the use cases you believe were more powerful and more useful and more likely to move the needle for your business. You have 30 seconds to cast your vote. The clock starts now. Wow, we are very very close. We're very very close to getting the last few votes here. And [gasps] wow. Okay, so I have the results. The voting is now closed. The results are coming in and the winner of round one is actually Ryan. [applause] Very, very slim, very slim margins for Ryan to win uh the first two use cases. Ryan, you take the early lead. Sorry. Uh one second. Got to Sorry, let me go back a bit. Uh Ryan, you take the early lead, but don't let your guard down because Patrick will be hot on your heels. Like it was very very close for um for both of these use cases. So it is still a very very tough fight. Okay. Uh let's move on, guys. Round two. The stakes are rising and the tension is building. This time Brian gets to strike first. Ryan, the floor is yours. Show us what else you got in store. Oh yeah. I like to think it was my trash talking that uh won me that last round. So I'll continue in that vein. Here we go. So we're going to get slightly more technical now. And uh I'll be honest, I'm cheating slightly because I'm pretty sure Patrick taught me how this actually works. But for our purposes, this is all me. This is nothing to do with Patrick. Um, I'm a big fan of using site audit to find outdated content and very quickly uh work out how and where to prioritize your content updating efforts where you can reclaim a ton of lost traffic. You can do this at scale intensely quickly find all the articles from previous years that you haven't outd haven't updated that you've forgotten about uh very quickly see the traffic changes and whether or not they've been updated. So, site audit, for those of you that don't know, this is a crawler that will visit all the pages on your website. Uh, it can analyze tons of different potential issues, uh, technical SEO problems that might limit your performance and a whole host besides that. And one of the features I did not even know it could do, but has since become one of my favorites, is you can search inside the page source of any page that you crawl. So obviously every pretty page on the internet has uh something like this behind the scenes. Uh the page source, the code that goes into actually building it. Uh and hidden within this there is a ton of super useful information that you can extract very quickly and easily at scale using site audit. Uh one second Ryan, are you sharing your screen? Oh yeah. Uh it says I have. I see it. Okay. Yeah. Sorry. Go ahead. Okay. sabotage, throwing me off my stride. No, no, no. Sorry, it's all my bad. Uh, one of the things I love to do with this, right, we have about a thousand blog posts on the HF's blog. Uh, lots of them were published as early as like 2017, and I'm a bit uneven in my ability to actually go and update them, make sure they're all up to date. So, what you can do very quickly is you can search within the page source uh, for the specific bit of information that says when an article was published. So the exact format of this will probably change depending on how your CMS is set up. For us, we have this HTML meta property with article modified time. And we can put the specific year in there. If you do that, click apply, it'll immediately filter all the blog posts you've just crawled to show you just those that were last modified in whatever year you've selected. So right now, immediately got a sample of articles that were last updated in 2025. Probably good candidates for updating. Even better than that, what you can do is if you go down to the columns, you can select organic traffic. So you can pull that data through uh and you can set changes to absolute and you can actually if you then set compare mode, compare the most recent crawl to say a crawl a year ago, you can see an estimate of the absolute reduction in traffic each of these pages is receiving relative to one year ago. So in a couple of seconds, you now have all the pages that were last updated a year ago, all of them ordered by the amount of traffic they're estimated to have lost. And then even better, you can very quickly see whether any changes were made to those pages during that time by looking at the changes column. Um, and if we inspect these, what you'll generally see is this kind of level of change, uh, for us at least is, you know, adding new footers or banners or that kind of thing. No substantive changes have been made to these. So, these are all fantastic candidates for blog posts to go and update. Make sure they're accurate, up to-date, maybe reclaim some of that traffic. And you can, yeah, get super granular with these filters. Any information that is within a page source, you can filter and search by. Uh, if I wanted to find just articles by a particular author on my team, I can do that by filtering by the meta author property. Uh, these are just ones that uh Josh wrote. Yeah, loads and loads you can do very quickly. I used to rely on Screaming Frog to do this kind of thing. Fantastic tool, but I can generally do it all here right now. Uh, and you can even see, yeah, exactly the individual changes, the page content of every single page. Uh, and also AI detector as well. This bad boy makes an appearance here as well. It's a very useful thing. All righty, next use case. We'll take it back a little bit. We got a bit complicated there. We're going to relax now. Nice smooth, easygoing one. Uh, particularly one for the writers among us. AI content helper. I love this tool. Um, of all the tools, this is the one I feel the deepest affinity for in HFS. Use it all the time. Now, the way most people use a kind of content scoring tool like this is you write an article, you dump it in, and you get a content score that says how comparable, how well you've covered topics relative to other top ranking articles. And that's useful. That's a good use case, but it does quite often lend itself to uh keyword stuffing. You want to add 20 points to your content score. You add in a bunch of sentences and headers that maybe you wouldn't otherwise have included just to nudge that up. What I'm a much bigger fan of doing and what we can now do after much pestering to the product team is actually build outlines much more easily uh and build content briefs in air content helper and then export them either to an AI tool to draft for you if you're into that or to a team of freelancers or to share with other people. All very easy to do. So we've got uh a topic set up here, secondary keywords. Um and one of the best things you can do, let me just hide these videos. Uh obviously we've got the topics report. You can see these are the topics that most other uh top ranking content commonly talk about. What I really like doing is looking at the headings. So if you have come up with a basic article outline structure of what you would like to write and you want to know if there are any content gaps, any things that the other websites talking about that maybe you should include, you can literally see the exact header structures of the competing articles right here in one interface. And if there's something you like uh like maybe I like the idea of write normally and avoid keyword stuffing that is the kind of header I would like some version of that concept idea in my outline. You can either copy it across or you can literally insert it somewhere uh and literally watch your content score change in real time. Uh so it's really good to iterate this way. You can pick individual topics, headers, build out your article outline and then job done. you can export it to a Google doc for anyone else to go away and use and write and build upon. So immediate instead of reading like 10 articles and then trying to get competitor intel into your outline, bring that data into the workspace where you write. Super super useful. I use it all the time. Cool. I shot my shot over to Pman. Okay. Awesome. Let me go ahead and take over from you here. so Ryan has shared his two use cases and he's not holding back at all. But will Patrick be able to counter with his attacks? Can the technical SEO mur back with equal force? Patrick, this the ring is yours. Show us what you've been saving. All right. I don't do easy. I don't go easy. This anyone can do this. It does not take that long. I've been doing these two strategies for 10 plus years. Even back when I was at a local SEO agency. Y'all have used our keyword gap tool, content gap, whatever we call that thing. It probably should be keyword gap. Uh you've probably also used the link intersect tool. Fun fact, that was modeled after a thing I wrote on search engine land I think more than a decade ago at this point. Uh, but Hrefs built it which was awesome. Anyway, I have a blog on scale content strategy. There's a presentation that'll walk you through multiple ways you can do this. The easiest for most people, most time consuming export. You go, you export a bunch of the top pages from your competitors. You combine all that. Uh, you create a pivot table. Again, it walks you through it. The blog does, the presentation does. You can do that. You can start this with a keyword list though. You can pull a bunch of SERs. I can do this now in less than five minutes with the API and probably with the MCP would also be able to do it that way. I have not tried that yet. I'm a little scared on how many credits that might eat up if you don't control it or like how many API units that might pull. Uh, but it's still worth doing. And let me show you why. What you end up with is basically an ordered list of the most valuable content in your entire niche. So, this is one I made like when I joined Hrefs and I was like, "Yeah, like we need pages on this." Like I I mean, this was including the HFS one, but then I actually like stripped those out and we're like, "These are ones we don't have." And I handed Josh a list of like 180 things that we need to create at the time. Um, that is so valuable. You, it literally is, you know, you can you can create the content, you can offload the content, you can have AI write a first draft of the content and improve it later. Don't just leave it like that. Um, there are a bunch of ways to do this. So, I'm I'm using examples from, you know, HFS, from some lawyers, I think accountants I got in here. Uh, you you can do this a number of different ways. So simple. You want to keep it like sort of, you know, this might take you three hours if you're exporting top 50 cities. Again, five minutes if you're using the API. Um, number of ways to do it. Anyway, I even vibe coded a thing that you can pull from the API for this. Uh, if you want to use that basically like you would just end up with the sites and then this will go out and get all the top pages and combine them for you. Pretty simple. But what you get is literally most valuable content in any niche. So in this case, this was for attorneys. Uh it was for a conference I presented at. Uh literally this is the content that is driving the most value in the law firm niche. I think I did this across like um 3,000 law firm websites, something like Uh you can do that with oh sorry this is the next one niche and local link. So like this is the link intersect version. We are going big data, big analysis. And it's the same again like if you're starting, you go use link intersect, but that's 10 10 sites. Why am I going to do 10? Why am I only going to do like 10 people in my same city? I can do hundreds, thousands. I can tell you there's like 40,000 law firm websites in the US. I could have pulled every single one of those if I wanted to. And I could give you a giant overlap of all of this. And again, I run you through all this, but this is uh this was I think for a CPA, an accountant. Literally, if I'm building links, look how many accountant sites there are. It's not that many. These are the ones where it's very easy to like go get uh links for accountants. It is not that I think this was for 50 uh I pulled at the time. 31 of them have links from privatebanking.com. Guess what? If I'm a CPA, if I'm an accountant, I can go get that link. 31 of my competitors already have this. And these again, these were like um accountants across like top 50 US cities. Uh not that many have them. I mean, seriously, this was probably two 300 accountants when I finally pulled all that data. And yet only third of one of them have this link. These are links that move the needle. They work. Uh when I used to do this, you can go build most of these like once you've got this list, you can go build most of these in like an afternoon. And I had people go from like not even page one to like top three in the market within the next month just by doing this. Again, I have a vibe coded thing where uh it will pull all the referring domains from your competitors, combine it for you if you want to use that. And this is uh this is one from the lawyers. Uh so again, this was a bigger data set. I don't remember if it was several hundred or several thousand I did this for. And it's basically all the law firm websites that you would kind of expect that lawyers should have links from. Just an order list. And like you even have some edus in there. It's usually uh people that went to Cornell, they can get a link from them. And you can just basically just go down the list and look look at the examples. look at why they were able to get links there, then go there. A lot of times it's like, yeah, let me submit this or like I went to this school, that kind of thing. Pretty easy. You can do this with local links, too. So, I took uh instead of just lawyers, I was like, "All right, I'm I live in Raleigh, North Carolina, and I was like, let me look at uh lawyers, dentists, accountants, chiropractors, blah blah blah." I took like 50 serviceings. There's a sheet in there that'll run you through it all. Uh, and I'm just like, okay, these are service businesses in my market. And then I did a giant overlap of all those. And this one's actually like segmented some. So, we have uh, you know, basically some some general North Carolina sites, some local uh, news and magazines, all the local universities, and even specific like neighborhood type sites. Uh, pretty amazing. Tons of opportunity here. I was able to find like local podcasts or like meetups and stuff. Uh again, if you if you work in local SEO, these are things you can get. These are things that very few of your competitors have and these are things that will move the needle. That's it. [clears throat] Okay. Awesome. So, I will go ahead and take over now. So that is the counterattack from Patrick. Yeah, both of you guys have showed some absolutely phenomenal use cases. Really building up from the last showdown that we had with Tim and Glenn. But now it's time for the audience to decide whose use cases pack the bigger punch. Audience, it's time to place your votes. Uh so let's go ahead. You have 30 seconds starting from now. All right. All right. I see the last few votes popping in. 10 9 8 7 six. So it's like you guys have like it's so very very competitive side by side of each use case. All right, I think the score is settled now. I will go ahead and record the score. Voting is now closed. The score will be reviewed at the end of three rounds. I'm going to keep it, you know, um, under the wraps for you guys, so you won't be able to guess who is winning, but I can tell you it's anyone's game right now. So, let's not waste any more time and move on to the next round, the final round. This is it, guys. Everything has been building up to this moment. Each fighter will be presenting their best, most powerful use case, the knockout punch. [bell] Once again, Patrick, this is your uh this you're up and this is your final chance to make it count. Go ahead. I'm calling it right now. Round three. He's going down. He's going to be begging the referee for a redirect away from this beatd down. My final strategy use case are redirects. Everyone knows this one. It's one of our most popular use cases in Hrefs. Best Buy links sort by status code 404. It's like an ordered list of redirects to reclaim links. All kinds of companies are forever changing systems, changing URL structures, getting new websites, redesigned, migrating different domains. Guess what? People don't do redirects. They spend all this money buying links, building links, all this time and effort just gone because no one bothered to spend an afternoon and put in redirects. This is the most common problem with website migrations, with new sites that I see. And there's a lot of lost value there. I mean, I you can, you know, map this out and say like, okay, if each link is like $300 or whatever, I've seen sites where this value goes into the millions, tens of millions of dollars. Uh, guess what? I have a script that will actually match this for you. It will pull old content from the archive.org, or the web archive, internet archive, pull content from your current site and basically just give you an ordered list of uh the redirects that you need to make. This is the close it's going to output the closest matching pages. So, you don't even have to spend much time on it. You can literally run this, come back in the morning or in the afternoon, go to lunch, come back, and you will have an ordered list of redirects. you can just put in the things that uh don't get talked about as much. There are also a lot of these links were hallucinated. AI is including links on hrefs now that guess what we never had pages for but is still linking to us. So if we want to reclaim a lot of that we can. There's another way to look at this and that's hallucinated traffic. So these AI systems AI search systems are actually sending us traffic. people are coming to these pages that do not exist. So, I would typically create some kind of business logic. If it's got, you know, more than five referring domains, more than, you know, 10, 20 traffic a month, I probably should be putting in redirects for these. I think we did one round of this, but apparently need to do some more because AI just keeps making up more stuff. You can also do this another way. Uh, so just because there is a redirect doesn't mean it's right. A lot of times people redirect to a homepage, to a category page or to, you know, a page that just isn't really as good of a match or shouldn't be where it goes. So, you can actually like look at what is redirected. You can crawl these, run that same script that I showed you, and see if there's a better match, a [snorts] better place you should be redirecting because a lot of times if you're redirecting to like a homepage or a category, it may not actually be passing value. like redirects, they need to be very similar in content. So, if you go from a very specific piece of content to something generic, guess what? The links probably aren't even helping you anymore. There's also um crap, I forgot what I was going to say here. Uh yeah, anything that's uh been redirected. So, in this case, it was uh we were moving off a section on hrefs.com/websites to a whole another website. This happens all the time. You get domains that come in. Sometimes you take stuff out. Uh and you want to make sure that these are all like working, that they're actually going to the right places, too. And then there's redirect chains. And inside audit, you can actually see all the redirect chains. Now, if they're chaining too many times, basically the value gets lost. Like Google just stops following them at a point. Uh which is usually after like 10 redirects. So any chains, anything that is like really too long, you want to clean up. And we have an issue for this in site audit. You can actually see, you know, we don't have anything longer than two chains, which is awesome. Not even that worried about that. But if it starts getting above like six, Google in a lot of cases will just stop following them. So if you really want that value to pass like you basically just take each and every hop in that chain and redirect it to the final location. We even have a thing that will uh will do this for you in in the patches system inside auto which is awesome. Anyway, that is my last one. Good luck to you Ryan. Yes, good luck to Ryan indeed here. Let me take over very quickly here. That is the final punch from Patrick. But will it be enough? Let's head over to Ryan now for his final use case. The last chance to sway the audience and the best is saved for last. Ryan, this is your moment. Leave it all in the ring. We got this. So, Patrick, you came so close to some important truths there, but you never quite landed that final punch. SEO is dead, right? That's why I keep hearing everywhere. No one needs to care about things like backlinks and rankings anymore. It's AI. AI is what mattered. And that is what this final use case is all about. So, let me set the scene for you. You have chat GPT in front of you on one of your gloriously large monitors and you put in a query, the kind of query that you would like your brand to appear for, and you don't show up. Instead, your biggest competitor is there, front and center, fills you with rage and agony, and you don't know what to do about it. Well, Hrefs has you covered. Uh, one of the best things to do with our new tool, Brand Radar, something I use all the time is closing visibility gaps with your biggest competitors. So, I'll show you exactly what this looks like. Imagine I work at the brand Patagonia, outdoor clothing brand. Uh they are deadly rivals with another outdoor clothing brand, Fjall Raven. They're not actually rivals, but you know, imagine they are. Uh something you can do very easily in brand radar is you can search our massive index of saved conversations and prompts and outputs uh across chat GPT, Gemini, Applexity, all these different models and find situations where your brand in this case Patagonia is not mentioned and not cited, but your competitors have excellent visibility. So, I've done this here for chat GPT. Very quick, couple of filters to set up. Very easy. Filtered to US, UK, um, other English-sp speakaking languages. And immediately you have a list of queries that your brand does generally not show up for, but your competitors do. And it's very easy to look at these and say, you know what, I want to be visible for these. So, what is the best backpack on the market? Patagonia make great backpacks. That would be a great opportunity to be visible for it. Who is the best shorts for men? I can tell you now Patagonia has some fantastic shorts. This is a good opportunity to get mentioned. What are the best cross body crossbody bags? Patagonia should be here. This is basically an ordered prioritized list of topics that you are not visible for, but you can be if you start creating content to fill these topic gaps. LLMs generally learn about your brand and uh its associations and the context in which it should be mentioned by the number of occurrences of your brand with words like cross body bag or best shorts for men on the internet. So if Patagonia wants to suddenly appear for these opportunities, it's a good chance to either publish, you know, articles about this on their website or find UGC sites talking about this and inject the brand into those conversations. uh guest posts and sponsorships, collaborating with other industry brands. This is basically your content calendar for AI search filled out in one go. You can do it for chat GPT, you can do it for Gemini, you can do it for, you know, what is the warmest puffer jacket. That is another great opportunity. So instead of fumbling about in the dark wondering why your brand isn't visible for the topics you would like it to be visible for, you can actually look and you can get a list of topics and prioritize creating content on those and have a road map from going from invisible in AI search to being very visible all with these couple of filters in brand radar. Simple. Don't need to elaborate and complicate things. That is enough for me. That was my knockout blow. All right. All right. All right. And that's it everyone. It's all 10 use cases have been delivered. So what a battle folks. What an impressive display of HS mastery from both sides. I mean really you guys are show like seeing what the best of the best of our company here actually use our tool to improve our company's marketing and now you guys get to take home some really incredible stuff the ATFs can do but now the fate of this showdown rests in your hands audience it's now time to cast your final vote whose use case in the end hit the hardest you have 30 m 30 seconds starting Now, it's it's close, guys. It's really close. Okay, last people, last few people. They're putting in their final their final votes. I'm going to end the poll Okay, let me tally the score. The voting is closed. Ladies and gentlemen, what we have witnessed today is nothing short of extraordinary. We saw Patrick Patrick stocks showcase a ton of incredible use cases around using HF's data not just from the platform but through scripts and automations that can really bring your strategies out into scale. We saw Ryan Law bring a bunch of use cases around content marketing. how you can uh optimize not just around your competitors but also the gaps about what AI is mentioning about your brand versus your competitors. So both fighters really left everything in the ring tonight and they demonstrated why they're among the most respected voices here at Hrefs. But only one can emerge victorious and you the audience you have spoken today. Today your champion is after AN ABSOLUTE WAR OF USE CASES. YOUR WINNER IS Ryan Long. HE CAME. HE FOUGHT. HE CONQUERED. [screaming] NOBODY OUT AUDITS THE LAW. All right. Sorry. Uh Ryan, you've just became the second Href's uh use case shutdown champion. How does it feel? And do you have any words for your opponent? Uh yeah, frankly, I'm surprised. Uh probably shouldn't have panned out that way, but here we go. I've learned so much from Patrick over the years that this feels like uh an impossible victory, but I will take it. Thank you, you noble audience. And I'm so so sorry, Patrick, that I had to crush you so thoroughly. Uh beautifully said. And now Patrick, you fought hard tonight. You delivered amazing value to our audience and everyone I mean in the comments were saying that they have to check out your scripts right after today's webinar. What are your final words for Ryan? And what do you what message do you have for everyone watching today? Oh, the judges are rigged. No, thank you. This was really fun. I very much enjoyed this. This was great. Yeah. Okay. And as pledged, Patrick will be donating $500 to FCDC. Uh Patrick, you are a champion in your own right, a true class act. Let's give a round of reactions for Patrick and Ryan, everyone. There we go. I think the the audience are the real champions today. Yeah, you guys like like showed up and like really really helped to settle today's showdown. So, thank you so much. There we go. All right, before we close out this historic events, there are a few important uh things we like to say. First is if you'd like to relieve the magic. I know some of you guys already asked this question or joined late. Um you can share uh the live stream that will be available on YouTube after this webinar ends. In fact, it's streaming right now on YouTube. So any colleagues who have missed out, they can absolutely go back and watch. And if you want to catch back on some of the use cases that you want to rewatch again and try side by side as you download either the scripts or um reference from the slides, you can do that from that webinar uh from that YouTube uh link replay. And second, when you close out this Zoom application, you will see a feedback form. Please take a second to share your thoughts. Your feedback helps us make these events even better. And who knows, it might just influence who we bring into the ring in future events. Uh there's no question for it set up, but if you have an idea of who you'd like to see on the stage today, you can also put that in your feedback. We'll take into account and we'll try to use that to basically uh bribe the next person to come on to a showdown. It can be anyone you guys any um marketer that you respect in the industry. Um if we can get them to come on and you guys want to see them on, we'll do our best. And folks, before you go Oh, wait. What's this on the screen? This looks like agent A. I'm not sure what this is all about, but could it be possibly something that can help you build some of the amazing workflows that you saw today presented by both of the contestants and more? Oh boy, you should definitely scan this QR code and sign up for the weight list then. Okay. And meanwhile, don't fret. There will be more action-packed live sessions coming soon in April. The announcements for them will be in your inboxes, especially if you're a subscriber. Uh so um you'll get to know that I think sometime next week. Okay. So definitely look out for more of these. We're not we're not stopping here. We know that um people really enjoy these webinars and we'll continue doing them as long as we can as long as we can like create like really fun and valuable content for you guys. Finally, I want to take a moment to thank our incredible competitors. Patrick, thank you for giving us your all today. your use cases were truly a masterclass in technical SEO and just like like scripts and automations in general across all the data that we have not just uh beyond just the basics and Ryan thank you for showing us how to go about marketing beyond just tools and data your use cases tonight were an eye openener on how we should approach content as a strategy and finally ladies and gentlemen I thank you all for joining us today I hope you've come away with insight ful ways that you can use HRS for your own work. Some that you have never seen before. I think plenty of them are are quite new to most of you guys which is like fantastic. And please look forward for the next live session and thank you so much for making uh time for today and making our community what it is. This has been DHF's use case showdown and it's been it's been a pleasure to be your host today. Until next time, keep building, stay hungry, and we'll see you in the ring. Goodbye. Uh-huh. Heat. Heat. Heat.