Powerful ways Ahrefs can help you win more in Search and AI (Feb 2026)

Hello everyone. We have a number of attendees already joined today's webinar. Uh if you have uh joined, you can see chat all well. Please message with um where you guys are dialing in from maybe what time it is there. believe we have people coming in from all different parts of the world. Really? Really? All different parts of the world. Yeah. We will go ahead and get started very quickly here. Yes. Welcome. Welcome. I was trying to find a way to broadcast, but I'm not finding a way. Huh? So, check this out later on. But don't worry about it. I think we will first focus on today's content and then uh because some of you guys have asked whether or not there'll be recording for today's webinar. Um there will be we record and um publish all our webinars uh on our YouTube channel on HFS tutorials and so if you want to look back at something that we covered today and and watch it again you will be able to do that once this webinar is over. So we have around uh 30 attendees that have already joined us. Uh some of you guys have joined twice and some of you guys are AI notetakers. Haha, sneaky. That's okay. Uh but all right then we'll just go ahead and get started. So welcome everyone to today's uh webinar about HF's tools. I am your host Constance. I am a product marketer here at HRFS. And today we are going to look at the powerful ways you can use HFS to win more in search and AI. So I have um taken the questions that people have submitted when they registered for this webinar and uh to create the content for today's webinar. Uh most of you guys will be uh new users here at HRF. So while you guys have spent some time to uh get to know the platform and and click around and learn how to uh use different tools, we will also I will also be showcasing um ways to do it specifically to improve uh to find data and opportunities to improve your search and AI visibility performance. So uh how this will work is that I will start with the main content for today and after I'm done we'll open the floor for Q&A. If you have a question there is a Q&A function in your Zoom. Uh it may be under the more section on the corner. So please ask your questions there. Uh but I hope I will be able to answer most of your questions um already because um because a lot of you guys submitted questions you'd like me to cover in today's webinar. So I will start with that and um if and so but I will only be answering those questions at the end after we finish the main content. Okay. So so without further ado uh let's begin. Uh I am sharing my screen here with HFS open at the dashboard. If you'd like to follow along please make sure that you're logged in and you're also seeing your dashboard to go through um alongside with what we are covering today. Now when as you see the dashboard open in front of you, I just want to highlight a few things about how our UI is structured so that you can find what you need to find in order to um like access the tools that you need. So we have a lot of tools that we have added um in the last like one to two years and um so you may have some see some here at the very top but in order to see all the tools please click on this all tools section here and you can use the stars to fix uh which tools you use often. So this is useful for uh making sure that you can access the the tools that you need or to find a tool that you you were not able to find when checking a tutorial or asking support or something. All the tools will be here. Okay. Um there are projects, portfolios, reports, keyword lists and and things like that. And that's related to um cross um tool projects. So you can add a project which I think most all of you guys would have been prompted to when you like first log into your account. Uh and that's typically your website. But like when you add a website as a project, you can see its data and like uh set it up to uh collect things for you or to run technical audits. So like one project will have uh relevance to multiple tools. So that's why they're on the side here and not at the top. Um we will cover these uh later on if we have time. Basically this is the main way to access uh the different tools that are that are respective to all these different projects that you may have. Okay. So that's how the UI typically works. Now I will um go into checking site explorer the first tool that I want to showcase for for any given website. You can type in uh the URL here. So for example I can type in hs.com or you can type in your own website. You can also type in uh any website. You don't have to have added it as a project first uh because site explorer can see the data for you be able to see the data for any website we have in our index for uh and the first thing I want to show is that there is a how to use thing uh link here at the top usually either this corner or this corner and this is useful for if you have no idea what this report is about like for example I can go to a report like the backlinks report and um if I want to learn more about how to use this particular report, you'll see this how to use link at the top. And if I open it, I'll be able to see um our main academy um directed exactly to the report I am on and watch a video that can explain to me how this uh report works like how to use um different use cases with it as well as different guides here at the bottom that like shows examples of what you can do with this report and what kind of data you can pull out of it. Okay. And then if I don't know what any of these headers mean, like I don't know what domain rating is or URL rating is, I can hover over the headers to get an explanation. And many of these I can also click in uh click on to filter for. So right now it's uh sorted uh sorted by page traffic. I can also sort it by referring domains if it's clickable. So that's something that you can also do just in case you want to um look through links um I mean look through results by a different sorting metric. Not every one of these will work but like you can see that they're clickable for for sorting uh if it's if it's possible. Okay. So, so like this is essentially a way for you to ways in which you can explore the platform um by clicking around if you if you if you prefer that versus looking at like video tutorials or or uh reading our guides. Okay. Now, so I want to go over go back to the overview because I want to show that um some of the more powerful features on our platform. It's not just about looking at what metrics a particular domain has. So I mean href's okay. So it has uh we it has 74,000 organic keywords and it has 4.5 monthly organic traffic, organic clicks. But what I also care about to to see is whether I can look at trends. So a lot of these graphs are very useful for me to understand how things have been uh trending over time. You can see that we're actually losing tra like organic traffic over time. So even if the numbers uh like for example organic traffic may not match directly to your Google search console or your uh your analytics uh like tool or platform like Google Analytics but like most likely the trends will not be very different and uh it is true we we have estimated less clicks over time as a website right and you can do that with any any website that you type in here to see what's going on and how it's trending. You see that we are losing positions across the board, right? So that's that's like a useful thing. You can select and unselect certain metrics to look at over time. I want to keep this on actually if I want to see both paid traffic and organic traffic together. Um I can compare it against competitors like this and apply. And so then I can see uh multiple websites on the same graph, right? And then I can look at this for like paid traffic for example. I can do it for AI overviews because in the day where there's less traffic going to websites um I can also see if there are changes to the number of organic uh AI overviews that show up for different competitors, right? uh I can look at this data on a year-on-year basis. So in this case, I'm looking at the number of AI overviews that my website has been uh showing up for cited for over on a year-on-year basis. They here like we're just starting 2026. So these are different ways to basically like site like look at trends to see what what has been changing over time. And if I can look at trends, I can then then narrow down to a specific uh time frame to see what what could have possibly uh forced that change. And how do I do that is I can go into for example the organic keywords report something like this. Give it a bit of time to load. Maybe we'll keep it at all locations for now. Okay. So then I can actually let's say I'm very interested in this uh drop here. So I can drag and select. So not all graphs have this feature but um if it does have this feature it makes it very easy to pick two dates. So now it knows how to pick these two dates for example and I can look for position lost or declined, right? And that's something that I can filter for. So whenever there's a drop in something, this is a way that I can help to investigate the issue. And this is like I'm currently showing you just general rankings for keywords. uh in a little bit I can show you how to look at this for in terms of AI overviews which is technically which is like an aspect of optimizing for AI. Okay. So I can look see that there has been changes here that I've either lost or um dropped in rankings. So I can see what these keywords look like. And then I tried to look at um for example how I lost this keyword by looking at a relevant SER. See now it it directly compares within this date range the closest days uh that we have SER data for to try and see the reason like the the reason for particular uh losses in ranking. So I see I got beaten by this website. This website got ranked up instead. All right. So this is a way so then I can like check out this open up this website and check to see uh what they have that like is better than my website or better than my pages. Uh Hassan I see your question but if possible can you ask in Q&A and then I'll answer it at the end uh of the content so that we stay on track. So now I want to look at um SER features. So, I can look to see, let's just clear this out for a second. And I want to add a specific filter where I want to look at where this website, this website here, whether or not, let's just select current for now, includes target in AI overviews. Okay. So whether or not my site gets cited in AI overviews and what keywords that would be. Okay. So now we filter that out. We can see and similarly I can filter for keywords that I rank for that AI overviews does not site me for. Okay? And this is citations not mentions. This is citations. So I'll show you just in a little bit how this works. Um so for example like uh this HFS free trial keyword right I can open up uh the SER the most recent SER and then I see okay um there's the AI overview over here I see that there are ads on top and if I open it you can see that one of uh like more than one of our pages is getting cited to answer uh its AI overview I won't be able to see what the text is but I can see that I am getting cited. So that's like even though you don't have if you don't have brand radar purchased for example you can still see this kind of information uh to confirm whether or not uh your website gets cited by AI or not but in this case it's specifically AI overviews. Okay. Um I can similarly check to see if I previously did but currently don't. I think in the past there was no AI overviews. So it is comparing before there was no AI overviews and now there is and my website's getting decided. So if I filter it similarly for previous I can check for keywords where previously there was some ranking uh or not ranking citation by AI overviews and then later on there was not there's a different set of keywords here and so there many there's a few steps first you have to see whether or not Google shows AI overviews at all for a particular keyword. Um and and then the second is to see whether or not you get cited. I think in this case, yeah. So you can see before HRS was getting cited and then afterwards is a whole list of other site uh of sources that is not hs.com. So that's like basically a way for you to check then then you can open up these pages and investigate to see how the content's been created to identify a bit more like what what your page had before versus what these pages have to see what could have been missing to um cause AI to stop citing your website. All right. So this is something that you can do. Okay. Um your plan may not have this compare function. I believe this compare search function is for standard or higher. But even if you cannot compare the SERs, you can still use this filter and just check um whether or not your website does get cited in Humai overviews or not. That's still like useful in that regard. Okay. So, if you're wondering why, oh, I can't really see this because I'm not on a standard or higher plan. And note that this filter should still work for you just one like date at a time. Okay. Um let's check to make sure I've covered what I wanted to cover. Okay. So, so that's essentially on this there like I've only looked at one report but we don't have too much time. So um in your own time you can check out all these other reports that cover different aspects of like both search as well as AI um visibility like back links uh the link content gap and l link intercept tools um like different different other all these different like um uh reports you can solely have a look and see uh what information is useful to you. And of course, if you want to know more about every report, please check out this how to use link uh for more information. Okay. Now, with this example where I show you how to check for uh keywords that your website like ranks for in AI overviews, you can do something similar in keywords explorer, which is the main tool that helps you look at different keywords and their like search volume, their keyword difficulty, so how difficult it would be to rank for a particular keyword, things like that. Um, as well as check for what SER um features show up for those keywords. And this is useful for let's say if your website's super new or like new to at least to SEO and it currently doesn't rank for anything then you want to look at um keywords that where AI overview shows up where it and what kind of websites get cited by AI overviews. Uh you can do that um via keywords explorer. So from the chat I would like to get some suggestions of industries that you guys are part of. Fastest fingers first. Okay. Fintech nonprofit. Okay. Uh all right. Fintech is first. So I put in fintech. Uh I I will um give look at some examples use the examples that everyone else have suggested maybe for later on examples. But I'm going to start fintech because there are many um keywords that are related to fintech. So it's a good example. Uh if I type in one keyword, I get the overview report for uh that particular keyword I entered in. I get to see things like search volume uh monthly in traffic potential, how much you get searched globally, the top countries. I get to see the most recent like SER that has been pulled. In this case, it did show up for AI overview. and you can immediately see the massive list of sources that was being used to generate the response. You can't see the response but you can see the links and that's still useful. Um and but if I want to actually keywords explorer allows you to search many many keywords at once. You can even upload a CSV or text file that has all the different keywords in a particular column up to 10,000 keywords at a single time. And this is how it look like. So maybe I want to look at like uh companies uh popular uh fintech companies. This is the AI suggestions tool. This is something that's for standard and above, but I'm using it right now just to quickly uh create some like keyword examples. So if I search this, you can see that even though I only searched once, I can see the data for many many keywords at once that I've entered in. And so you don't have to just search one keyword at a time. You really can just upload a whole list of uh like thousands of keywords as you need to see their metrics in a single time. The other thing that is also useful is that I can because of all the keywords I've entered in, I can also look at the matching terms uh report where it is looking at the keywords I entered in here to find other keywords that match any of these uh like words within keywords that I've entered in. Okay. So in this case even though I only entered in 10 there are over a thousand suggestions and this is I'll first answer the questions about how we look in terms at uh keyword research on a search aspect versus um AI optimization and because there were quite a number of you that asked questions about okay so how can I do keyword research in a new day and age where people are using AI to answer the questions um where where I can check whether or not how to improve my brand being mentioned or or being cited, things like that. And um I think one of the key things that have changed um before with SEO, you're looking to optimize for specific keywords that type in into search. Um but in these days, AI can be answering questions for any kind any like sort of prompt. People are writing in whole essays, asking questions. So it is less about optimizing for a specific keyword and more optimizing for topics or what people ask or like different um spheres of knowledge that people are trying to learn more about. So instead of trying to optimize for uh you know top for example let's just ignoring what your business is just this is just to give an example like oh I should optimize for top fintech startups 2025 versus uh top fintech startups in Asia Pacific 2025 right uh instead I should look to see that hey people are looking at top lists of companies in different fintech spheres like insurance tech uh maybe uh in things like investment management um there people are looking for information about emerging trends people are looking for for banks so they're trying to look at different lines of industry I can also filter for questions there's this section to to filter for questions here and this gives me ideas of like this is closer to what people tend to put into search these or like they tend to type into AI these days it's not just particular keywords they will ask a question or they'll ask something that's very very detailed and very nuanced like a question now you can see questions that are like oh fully digital businesses how are um how is fintech changing how many unicorns are there so these are like different spheres of knowledge they think holistically about what kind of content you can create rather than oh I have to target this keyword because it has a search volume of a thousand and it has a keyword difficulty of Okay. So, but like you can see that um keywords explorer allows you to basically get information on both sides, both search and AI. Okay. And of course um you can go down this list to see different ways in which we generate keyword ideas based on our uh database of keywords. Um the second main way in which we generate keyword ideas is also based on rank also rank for. So the difference here is that in the first report matching terms we look at these individual words in your keywords and then we go okay what other keywords have the same words right but in related terms we look at these like keywords that you entered in and then we see the top 10 ranking pages for all these keywords right the top 10 ranking pages and then we see what other keywords those top ranking pages also rank for. So these are usually industry related keywords that don't include disruptive fintech startups or emer or like fintech app developers, stuff like that. They actually have branded keywords here um and talk about banking, you know, things like that. And similarly, you can also um filter for top 100 or top 10. You can like basically stack on any number of filters here that your plan uh supports to maybe look at uh for example I want to see at minimum search volume of 500. Okay David if you can uh put your key your question in the Q&A section I'll help to answer it at the end of today's session. David and Punk uh Punk Punk Kudaj, sorry, don't sorry if I butcher your name. Can ask a question in the Q&A and you can upvote any questions you find related. I'll answer them at the end. Okay, so like and then you can continue to stack on. You can um filter for particular languages. This one is US. So, usually it's mostly English, but in another country that you guys are that like targeting, you can filter that are multilingual, uh, you can filter for specific languages here. Um, and also, and I just want to show you guys, as I promised, I can look at uh where keywords where air overview shows up or doesn't show up. So, in this case, I'll look for doesn't show up, Maybe I want to target these keywords because um and there are keywords where AI overviews does not show up. Not that many though. But you can see that there is a number. Maybe I want to rank for those. And you can use keywords explorer to basically uh filter out and check for these um keywords or in this case like areas. So in this case, I think people are are um these are keywords related to people trying to find a particular login page uh on their fintech company to to log in or they're looking for specific applications, right? But again, these are keywords that have search volume. These these represent people that are actively searching for a solution either in Google or in AI and you can use that to inform your content strategy. Uh okay. So and then the other thing I want to showcase is uh and this is a relatively new feature as well. You can actually filter for target in a list of keywords. So for example, I want to look for a keywords where Reddit shows up as a result. Okay. So keywords where target ranks for in the top 10, Why is this important? Because uh discussion forums like uh Reddit and Quora and some like industry specific ones uh tend to be used by AI as answers. So, if I see that there are keywords where um uh a forum like Reddit shows up in in the top results or in AI overviews, I can look into what pages they are, right? By clicking the SER overview and I can check out. So, in this case, uh for example, I can open up this page in Reddit and see this is a question that people are searching for. I could consider making content about that. I can see what people are recommending here, right? Oh, skip a bank and open a brokerage account, for example. Oh, here here are suggestions that people make. So, this is not only real people that find these answers in search, it's also data that gets fed into AI. So this is how I I get to use a tool like hrefs to find what exactly gets fed in as answers and see whether or not that is something that I could for example if it mentions your brand. You could check if if the data is correct. You can see if the conversation is um citing something that is outdated. You can also see if there's like people are having discussions where actually you should get involved or your website should have content around. Uh guys. Okay. Um I'll tell you what. I see people are asking questions in chat. I will answer the questions in Q&A first and if I get time I will answer the questions that I typed into the main chat. Is that okay? To make sure that we keep keep on track. Uh so so like but try to use the Q&A function and we'll get to them at the end. So definitely go check this out. Um and like not only like do you get data about like questions based on the way that I've that I shown earlier all the different ways I shown earlier but this in of itself is a question. So these are ways in which you can look into um like topic ideas for you to uh create content around. Uh you can also use this like for example this could be a custom prompt that you can um type like search into AI to see what kind of answer shows up uh that gets generated by AI, right? Um I will show you we actually very recently uh launched a way that you can track uh regularly uh AI responses for um any custom prompt that you enter in. And I'll show you guys that in in a little bit. Uh before that I want to very quickly highlight the other two tools that you will get prompted to when you create a project on our platform and that is site audit here right you get to see all the projects that you have audited before. So for example this one that I've audited last month. And um a very the the simplest way to use something uh this this particular tool is to address all the problems uh that get flagged. So um there is all you can see here if I click onto the issues you can see all the issues that get flagged for a particular uh project. We track up to 174 by default. And you can add custom issues like if there's something very specific that you want uh site audit to check for you for your pages, you can also customize that as an issue. Uh but I will not go through it today unless people want to learn more about that. Uh and if you're lost into what to focus on and you're looking, boy, this is a long list of issues. The main ones that are critical are red this one. So if you're not sure, focus on the red ones first. and broken redirects. And then the yellow ones are issues that are not uh like web like website breaking uh critical to uh the experience of both uh LLMs as well as uh search users, but they may be concerning. So like if you're missing titles or something is too titles are too short or uh what's an example? Yeah, paid like images that are missing alt text. You can check to see if that is intentional or like you would like to improve the abilities for particular images to show up show up in search. You can like look at all the images that get flagged without alt text. And then for example, you can see this is the page that contains the images and then these are the linked images without the alt attribute. Right? Right. So these are all the images. Okay. And similarly uh the questions around site audit show up a lot because like they go okay I have no idea what this like issue means. Click on why and how to fix. It gives you an uh some information about like why this is a problem. And then uh we have a how to fix guide here a general guide. And this usually has links to more resources that explain ways in which you can improve and fix problems. Okay, you can do this. This shows up for every single like issue that you will have inside audit. So when you are lost and you have no idea what this is, you can click on why and how to fix. Okay. Now I also want to uh talk about rank tracker. We're going a bit quick because I want to make sure I want to cover everything we want to cover today. Uh so rank tracker is the tool that allows you to uh track for custom keywords like any keywords you want to define uh and see a website's uh rankings for any location you'd like to specify. The main difference between site explorer and uh rank tracker is that a you can decide what keywords you want to rank and b you can actually be more specific than a particular country. So site explorer the first tool that we showcased here um is only at the country level but for example um in this help articles project I think I can show you case this in more detail I can set a more specific location did I do that no okay I'll give an example let's say I want to add keywords okay to this project now I can type in like not just United States I can put in Virginia Beach. I think I can put in even a zip code. Okay. Zip code. Yeah, you can do that. Oops. All right. So, you can get very very specific in a location that you can uh target. And this is to help answer one of the people's questions that uh that got submitted to us about local SEO. If you want to track how your rankings are doing in a specific location, um a rank tracker will be super useful for you uh to do that. And uh another thing that I want to is also our ability, this is very new to import history based from uh like our history uh positions history data from site explorer. Okay. So why? Because uh some of you guys may be coming from other platforms that already have uh tracking like keyword tracking data and there's like no way to import from one platform to another platform and you want to keep that historical data and in that case um for example in this case I can add these keywords. Uh for example I want to look for keywords that say that that have the word what in it. Oh, it didn't work. Okay. Uh, let's just give some example here. Um, tools, free tools, and what are HFS? Okay. So, I have these keywords here. I say I want to import the history. So, then I can add the keywords. So that will help to take even though um normally if you add uh keywords into rank tracker today you'll only get to sorry you only get to see the data from today but if you import the history then you can see uh data from as far as we at HFS have positions data for that keyword you get to see it as well so you can go further back okay so that's the benefit of that that feature. So definitely get to um make use of it if if you're worried about oh like I'm not able to track the history of keywords from before I joined uh hrefs. Okay. Um some one other tool that I want to mention is web analytics. this everyone here that have joined this webinar you should be able to use this particular tool because it's available even for free uh and what that has what it helps you do is basically a uh privacyfriendly alternative to Google Analytics alongside many other things that uh we think are very very useful. So, for example, and and like to use it, it's very simple. You just install like a JavaScript uh tag onto your website and basically it'll help to track the the different visitors that come to your website. Uh as well as other things like your top visited um pages, uh you can set up uh like tracked events, UTM tags, all all the basics are there. There's some additional features that we have included which is one related to AI search. Like if you get any traffic from uh people who click on uh citations in AI answers you'll be able to see uh the sources like in this case chat GPT is the top then perplexity and Gemini and then you can see also the top pages uh that get clicked that get like referred to from AI where you get traffic from and that's great because that's like an area to see um where your your best performing pages that get cited a lot in a uh in in AI answers. Okay, so this is like a good way for you to see what pages are working well. Also to see what pages don't get cited at all and and by being able to monitor this over time, you get an idea of whether or not things are improving or not in terms of uh like AI visibility. Okay. All right. So, so yeah, definitely go check this out. There are a few other things here uh that you can also do, but I'll not cover them today. But yeah, like if you have this uh AI web analytics, sorry, web analytics installed, you can go check out um the different ways to understand your uh traffic coming to your website. And not just organic, but all of it. Okay. All right. Now, let's look at the next one. Okay. So, we I want to showcase. So, earlier I showcased to you guys how to check um citations in area overviews for different websites. I should of of course mention that we have brand radar. All right, which is our main flagship tool for you to help understand your brand's visibility in different AI platforms, citations on different platforms, but also your visibility in sources commonly used to site in uh AI uh answers which is like things like Reddit, uh Tik Tok and YouTube. Now what I will do since you guys um not all of you guys have um purchased the brand raider add-on you can try these demos and by trying these demos you'll be able to access all the reports based on these filter options here. So, if you want to follow along, so I'll show you again. Click on any of these demos, okay? Then you'll be able to see what brand Radar can show you. And once you have this open, so in this case, we're trying to look at mentions of your brand, in this case PlayStation versus your competitors, Xbox and Nintendo. right now. I'll be able to see over time like how the number of mentions of these different brands as they go up over time as well as on different platforms. Okay. Um if I want to go into more um detail as to see the specific responses, I can click on AI responses and then filter for different sources. And here in this case, I can look at the actual AI overview that gets generated. Let's filter for I think in this case United States. So we can see stuff in English. Okay. So if I want to see more information about uh like a lot of these are related to people searching about release dates uh for different games on PlayStation. So if I want to see the answer that gets generated, I get to see uh the mentions of my brand versus my competitors bolded in the answer as well as the citations. Okay. And if I want I can switch to so in this case let's say if I want to look at chat GPT there I get to see that a lot of these are questions. So if you're wondering why all of these look like questions, it's because a lot of data that gets populated uh and searched in these AI assistant platforms are people also ask questions um that we have in our database. So for example, there's this question, why are switch games $80? a common like this is this is uh bas it's not exactly this is still a synthetic prompt in that like it's not the reason why this keyword is here is not because we have actually have data that people search this in in any of the AI platforms however it is questions get shown up as people also ask in Google based on keywords that we know have search volume in search so they are in in in this way more databacked than just random synthetic uh keywords that get generated based on a particular brand or something something like that. So in this case I can see how the the answer gets generated. I can see all the citations here. In this case there 19 sources and and this gives me an idea of how um an answer is getting formatted and how they're picking that information through these different sources. Okay, this informs the way that if I want to create content around this topic, I have to answer these particular questions uh in these specific ways. So I can look into how um like yeah so basically this is how I would use the data here to inform my own content creation. I also like for example I also have to look into these different um areas in which they're picking their uh answers to get generated. So like review platforms and as mentioned earlier YouTube, Reddit, Facebook. So these are also sources to say okay can I I need to check to see whether or not my brand is being mentioned here as well as how it's being mentioned uh whether or not it's something that I can reach out to the author and answer or is it some kind of a forum where I have to get more involved. These three indexes here are in beta and good news for you guys is that if they are in beta you should be able to access them even if you don't have access to Brand Radar's uh add-on. See video visibility is in beta available to all paid customers. Uh so this should be if you're a light subscriber and higher and then you can access uh you can look into for example mentions of the brand you can see um that it can be found in the transcript or in the uh video title video description. And how this helps me understand a few things. The first is the kind of video formats that attract brand mentions of either my brand or my competitors as well as influencers that I can probably try to work with or see how they get um like what kind of sponsorships they get, whether or not they accept it, what kind of formats or what kind of influencers, not just the influencers themselves that I can target um to to see whether or not we can do partnerships with or sponsorships with uh to get mentions of my brand. It also shows me for example what kind of uh content ideas attract uh like are very relevant to mentions of my brand. It's not just particular games. In this case they're talking about games. They're also talking about consoles. They're even talking about like things that are not even related. It's just like themed uh other side side businesses that are not necessarily into gaming. All right. So these are all insights that I can gain from using uh all these um using brand radar in this way. And then similarly I can look at Tik Tok, right? So these are Tik Tok videos and Reddit. Okay. So while they're in beta, please make use of them as because you have access now. Uh and then once it's out of beta, then it becomes a paid add-on. Okay. And as mentioned earlier, I talked about how you can it's very similar to rank tracker in that you can now track custom queries in different AI platforms. Okay, I want to show you how this works. So let's go back into brand radar. So I've set up this demo report here and I click on tracked prompts. So here I can set up like this is just something I entered in as as like a prompt. If I add a prompt, I can create like as long of a prompt as possible in here. And um each one line I can also then configure. So I'll show you all the options that you have when you want to track a custom prompt. Okay, this is the most recent uh generator response that I can see. Where can I edit it? One sec. D. Oh no, I have to add a prompt. Okay, so for example, what is the best tool for analyzing both AI and LLM visibility performance and search performance or something like that, right? So I can add a prompt and it gets added to the list. Oh, okay. Sorry. Uh this is where you have to do it. Where is the report settings? So for all these prompts here, these five prompts here, I can turn I can switch on frequencies of different AI assistants that I want to track their answers for. I can set the like I can turn it off if I want. Let's say I don't care about Copilot. I can turn Copilot off. Um I can also set which keywords that I want to write like and check the um mentions for. I can also select the location. Okay. So, and you'll be able to see like how many checks that consumes once once this setting is set. Uh, one question to to definitely answer is that can I just buy this custom track prompts and not have to purchase like the other AI brand add-ons? And yes, you can. It is uh custom package. A purchase. It starts at $50 a month for 2,500 checks per month, believe. So, you don't have to buy like the 1999 or the $6.99 uh to get access to custom prompts is a separate purchase. All right. Um where are we at? Okay. So the last question I think um people asked about is NCP server. So if you don't know um I will share the documentation for it. Here MCP I'll also link it in the chat. So this is the way that you can fetch href's data via um your preferred AI assistant if they support MCP uh server connectors and it you if you have a light or higher plan. So you see here uh where does it show paid plan starting on light? You already have access to this. Um you just have to connect it and we have different guides here and how you can set up uh your connection uh of MCP server to um your your platform of choice. And just to show you how it looks like here, I'm going to do a quick demo and change the screen that I want to share. Okay. So Claude, so in this case I'm showing you Claude. So um what I've done is I have asked Claude to a question for example, how does my website atrifs.com search performance in a Google two overviews and three chat GBT compare against its top three organic competitors? Please use hrefs to analyze this and suggest ways I can improve performance on all three phones. Now before I ask a question like this, I want to make sure that the connector is is is logged in and and turned on. So uh here I have HFS connected. So I like if I want to confirm, I can manage it here and there's the options to configure and it's an easy way to configure. Usually you can browse and find hrefs and then uh then uh it will trigger you to log into your account and allow the connection to happen. Okay, it should be quite straightforward but if you don't if you struggle with this you can like contact our support we can help with that. Uh when I asked this question if I connected it basically tried to look into uh using different uh API points. So you can see that it used this organic competitors API point to find the three uh organic competitors and then it also looked into um batch analysis and I used brand radar to fetch data for all these different brands. Okay. So that's how you can see how it happened. Yeah, in this case it also looked at cited domains and things like that. So then it generated a report for me. Uh it showed me who is the winners, losers. It also gave me suggestions on like what HFS does really well and what gaps it has against its competitors and then suggestions of what to improve. So this is like a way in which I can use AI to basically give me ideas on how I can improve my AI um visibility based on the data provided by ATRS. Okay. Um so that like you can try this out. There were a number of you guys that asked about what are ways that I can prove my website's a um L invisibility and of course AI can hallucinate and AI uh has things that it's generating things not based on like you know official documentation by claude or anything. This is just a generated answer but it's like based on data that you can fetch from hrefs as well as guides that it cites across uh you know the web related to AI visibility and and search. So it's a good starting place if you have nowhere else to do it would be a good place for me to like look into ways to improve my website. Okay, you can check this out. Most of you guys that have at least light or higher, you can check out NCP server to get this set up for you. Okay. And uh I also want to link that we have um a blog that goes through 15 use cases for MCP. So this is just one that I showcase to for you today, but there are many many others that are useful. Uh as well as even more advanced one that like connects with other tools that support MCP server connectors. So definitely do check that out. And finally, there were questions that people had that were specific to their website like, "Oh, I had issues logging in. I had some issu like uh I saw some problems in my Google search console when connecting to hrefs. I saw uh issues on on my website when I used this plugin or something. Um I I will not be able to answer specific questions here. Please contact our live chat at help.hs.com. atfs.com. I'll quickly show you how to uh do that. Okay. If you have not already uh contacted our support, so at the bottom here, you'll see this uh like intercom icon and then you can send us a message here and then you can type in your question. Okay. We um support 24x5. So like 24 hours on every weekday and on weekends we have limited support. So you should be able to get an answer from our team about anything related to your account or hrefs here uh as you need. Okay. So we're at the end of the main stuff that hopefully it has helped to cover content that was useful and answering the questions that you guys entered in when you registered for this webinar. Now I will go through the questions that people asked in the Q&A and then if we have time in the chat. So let's start with the Q&A. Um S Vata asked, "Will there be a recording of this webinar?" Yes, it will be uh uploaded onto YouTube after this webinar is over. So if there's any part that you like to see again, you can watch it there. Uh and like we email all attendees the a link to to the replay. Um, Savan, I've just answered that question. So, um, you'll get you it is all of our webinars is on our HF's YouTube channel, uh, specifically HF tutorials. So, I'm going to show you uh, HFS this one here. Okay. So all our past live streams, all our previous webinars are here as well as other videos that we have including even uh presentations we did at HRF evolve our conference. Okay, next question. Uh is there a way to see a shift of keywords from search to um AI overviews? So if you were previously ranking in search and then later only ranking in AI overviews, is that what the question is? That's a good question. I'm not sure. Maybe. So, and I think you may need to have the standard plan to see SER like SER changes. So, I will filter for SER features uh previously in search and then currently in AR overview. So includes includes target in air overview that's most likely how I would search for it. Okay, here. So SER features current includes so before and current includes target in AI overview is the filter section and then you can set the date here as you need of how you want to compare before and after. So let's say uh now for example if I want to look at uh HFS what is live this keyword. Whoops. here. So, it doesn't uh show examples where where a keyword uh where you previously rank for only search and then after that only AI overviews, but it would show that previously you did not rank for AI overviews and and then currently you do. That's the closest filter option that you can get. I hope that's useful. Anthony asks, "What does it mean uh when you see an increase in organic keywords but a decrease in traffic?" what does it mean? It can mean a few things. If if you want to know what that means, I have to find you have to give an example here, Anthony. I think you may need to share your if this is your website maybe you can share it and then we can look but uh like when you have an increase in keywords but then you reduce in traffic it could be because AI overviews are showing up more for the keywords they're ranking for even though you're ranking for more keywords it could be that people are clicking less in general not just uh because air overviews is there it could mean that you're ranking for more keywords that overall get searched less by people so like even though you rank for even more keywords but they're keywords that not not a lot of don't get searched a lot. So these are different ways and in order for you to know what is the reason you have to check the websit's like organic keywords report and then drill down to see what are the top like before and after uh keywords like how do they differ right you can see that maybe they have less volume across the board you may see that uh all your positions are dropping so and and then then you may ask okay so so what does that what does that mean well then the question becomes do you care about these keywords or is this traffic therefore converting to more sales or less sales and to determine whether or not that's a problem for you. Okay. Uh question of how to check for keyword cannibalization. Keyway cannibalization. Uh a good blog on this is this one. Okay. Uh it has a guide to show you how to check for keyword cannibalization. Here's an example. I'm going to zoom out this this image. So you can see here that we have this feature called position history. And so you can see for a particular keyword what of your what uh pages that are ranking at the top um show up in the SER together. And in this case you can see it keeps getting replaced. It's between this this page and this page. It keeps getting replaced in the top 10. So this is like very key case of uh cannibalization. Um I will share with you a link here. It goes into explaining why this is cannibalization and how to do this. Uh and if you want to see the positions history chart, it's this squiggly line button here. This one. Okay. Uh in this case, it's not too clear that there's cannibalization. I think I have to search for top 10. Yeah, because uh this is referring to site links. So, a bunch of site links show up and then they don't show up. But yeah, so it's hard to show an example live. That's why I'm sharing the blog. Uh but if I want to check for cannibalization, I look at that guide that I just linked and I check the positions position history chart. Okay, so have a look and hope it's useful. How do you define a good backlink? a good backlink fundamentally is a backlink. It's a link from a page that is relevant and useful uh when mentioning your your brand or your your blog or your product and that it you know refers to your an uh website in a relevant meaningful way that is useful to um the website visitor. Fundamentally that's what a good backlink is. Um it comes from it comes from a website that is that has authority. So it comes from a like usually a high uh domain website uh domain uh rating website. But not just that the page that links your your um to your website the the referring page that contains that backlink should also have good authority. So, so it should not be some random page that is buried, you know, um buried within many many hundreds and thousands of pages that also links to random stuff. It ideally should be uh a page that is also useful to other people and not just not just a random uh like it like just let's give an example, right? It's a good way to give an example. I can look at um this back links here or actually I'll use uh best this best buy links report I think is an easier example to showcase. So this particular report basically uh ranks all the pages uh of the website that you entered in here uh based on the number of backlinks it has. So this report is very useful because it helps you see what kind of pages are attracting back links and it's taking a long time to load because unfortunately there's a lot of pages. Okay, so here you go. So I mean the top page here is our homepage but also you can see that we get a lot of links to our free tools. Free tools. These are all free tools. Uh our product pages and then statistics studies that we've done. many studies that we have done, guides, beginner guides. So these are um so these are the pages of our website that get linked by many many other people. So if I want to see what these links are, I can go to its back links report here, the search traffic study. And then uh things I like to do is I like to filter for okay, I'm not going to turn this on just to explain what is what I consider as good. So in this case, I want to look at do follow back links. I want to look at uh links that can I see traffic links that contain at least some traffic. So maybe like 200 uh monthly traffic for example like and then I'll see what examples I show up or they come from DR of at least 30. already even though we had many many links before, you can see many of those were not very useful. They're not very good uh impactful. Now we filtered down for referring pages itself have some uh traffic as well as do follow and like some minimum domain rating. So this is just like typical metrics that can help you quickly filter out for for pages that could be uh powerful, right? So then I get a list here. So you can see that these are also um from like higher authority websites. They're relevant to like SEO.com, sealoprofit.com. Uh they're different blogs that have some reputation. A lot of these pages are relevant to SEO and they're they're guides, they're check their checklist. They're not some random like uh listical page. They're not some random like discussion page that have like a lot of garbage on it. Um see they're all guides and and blogs and stuff like that. So So that's how you disscertain. And you can see how it's mentioning the brand the the our website and linking to us, right? It's it's describing it in a in a meaningful way that's referring to our traffic case study. Okay. Okay. So, these are the ways for you to determine if a backlink is is good or not. Okay. there. Okay. There's some questions here related to competitors. Um all right, let's let's go in order. That's fine. Um Dave is a small business with limited SEO knowledge and experience. launch a new website and you don't really know what they're going to do or what the money is going to go to. Um, is there a specific set of questions I can ask and measure the provider? Okay. Uh, let's see if this blog is still up. I think agency. Let me double check. We made a blog specifically about how to hire an agency. I think here uh there's one blog as well as I think there's also like higher freelance writers. yeah, something like that. Or new website here. SEO for new website. Eight important steps. Okay. Um these two blogs might be helpful for you. Sorry, I have to link blogs here because it's kind of specific. It's not really in the scope of today's webinar uh or our tools. So um you can have a look to see whether or not these things these sort of like um basic stuff is done. Any insights you may have when hiring a company u would be useful here. So you can see if they're useful for you otherwise we can't really advise on this area. Okay. Sorry Dave, but I hope they're useful. Um HRS just lists branded names as default competitors, not actual industry competitors. Um this is asked by anonymous person. Uh the anonymous person if you can add like share the link to your website I can check to see what you're referring to. I think you are referring to this report here for organic uh competitors. Okay. Uh this report basically looks at the top like in this case I think it's top pages or domains in this case it's top pages that share the most number of organic keywords that this particular page does. and then it treats it as a competitor, which means you may not get a direct competitor in your industry. Even if that website is not a direct uh like like an actual if you run like a a plumbing company or something and you don't see your fellow um plumbing com uh websites, maybe you even see like a company that is not in the same country, they're still your competitors because they're showing up in your search results that people are looking at and they're looking at those websites and not yours. So in that way you still have So if we define it this way like so you may have to worry about them on a like marketing and SEO standpoint. Um of course what you can also do is you can search their websites here like the the competitor's website directly here or um if you use a competitor analysis tool like compare gap you just put in their websites manually like competitors you just put it manually here and then see and analyze. Okay. So you don't like we make suggestions based on like top organic keywords but you can manually add them as well. So I hope that helps. Panage uh pan sorry pankage pankage sorry if I butcher your name. Why is the Google itself sheet not downloading in this? Um this is a specific question to I think you have a page open that you're not able to figure out. I can't see it. best that you contact our live support uh our chat support so that and then ask them whether or not you can uh you can show them what what issue you're facing. Sorry, I think that's the best. Um is there any free tools? David asks uh we have one particular help article that goes through all the free stuff that we have at Hrefs. Okay, free. So, what can I use for free in HFS? We made a quick list of things you can do for free in Hrefs that don't require a subscription. Um, there are ways to, for example, our main free plan allows you to look at metrics specifically for your verified websites only. As well as the web analytics tool that I showed you guys earlier, that's free. Like, it doesn't require you to pay for anything. We have our social media manager, that's also free. uh you can install our toolbar into your browsers and look at onpage uh like like uh technical structured data as well as SEO metrics and things like that. So and then we have other free like AI tools as well to help you with writing. So that's like all stuff that you can try for free. So I hope that answers your question. Uh, how does web analytics track UTM links? How do you generate UTM links? I think we have a guide. There we go. Uh, I think so. No, this is for creating funnels. Um, UTMs should work exactly the same as it does in Google Analytics. So, I don't have a dedicated a guide for this here. I think we'll check back to make sure we set that up for you. But, um, it tracks. So, if I go to one of our projects that have web analytics set up, maybe I can show you, maybe not. Uh, but it should be tracked events and then you create a new event maybe page view and then Maybe this is not the one. I think it has been changed. Sorry, I have to check on this and get back to you. But there's a way to do it. Yeah. No, you have to create it's a track event. I know. And then uh so for example event Okay, sorry. Oh, but there I'll I'll get back to you on that. Uh, Servita Vasta, but it should be the same as Google. Um, yeah, I'll get back to you on that. Uh, Dave asked, "Is there in introductory training videos and courses?" we have an academy here. This is specific of how to use HRES, but we also have this is specific to our tool. If you want to see all our different like video courses on uh different aspects of SEO, we have it here as well. So you can have a look. The one that is most updated is um about uh how to use HFS and how to use brand radar though. These two are the main ones. So you can have a look. Okay. Um and see if that's useful. But also like today's content which is just an hour long would like ideally also be helpful to you guys on how you can uh improve your knowledge about both our platform as well as SEO in general. Um the one that gives you certification is comes from the content of this particular course here this one. Okay. So if you want to be HF certified you can go through this course and then take the exam over here. Um will be will my domain authority be affected if I disallow many spammy and suspicious links? Uh we have covered this a lot in our blogs as well as our help articles whereby this whole um thing of disavowing uh backlinks is a concept that was prevalent in the early you like Google days and by early I mean 2014. So like more than 10 years ago, 12 years ago when Google was easily manipulated by um uh backlinks that were like systematically generated and not necessarily useful to people searching for stuff, but Google in their progressive updates to the algorithm basically has ways to manage that. So you should really be focusing efforts on disallowing backlinks only if you're penalized by Google. And you get to see that uh by checking your Google search console. Uh we have I think this uh blog about spammy toxic links here a few of them. And the quick answer is that it's usually not going to be make a big impact to your website at all. Um there's so many other things that you can do to improve the authority and the performance of SEO as well as AI visibility of your of your website than disallowing uh disavowing. So that's what I would suggest. The only time they will make a big impact maybe is if you get penalized by Google and even then sometimes if you disavow Google may still not uh revive your website. So okay uh Dave says thank you. Uh, Andrea asks, "This is the last question in the Q&A. What is the link for the location where today's video will be held?" Um, you will get emailed that by the like um afterwards, not now. Okay? And then you you can check that and basically reference the content for today and uh and and rewatch any of the sections that you like to see again. Uh let's see if there are any questions that were not answered uh in the chat. Jonas asked how do you calculate the search volume for explicit terms? Google doesn't provide search volume data for these terms. We are not. So you can check our database. uh we don't have we don't only source from Google's uh database of keywords data excuse me so we have um let's say I can search for just I'm going to type nothing here for United States we're in keywords explore right now and I'm going to click search and why I do this is because uh adult industry terms actually get searched a lot surprising surprise. You can do this in every country. You'll see that there's a lot of adult search terms that usually hit the top. Uh and you can filter for this. Find a way to filter for this. I think exclude sensitive categories. So you can filter this out. Um but let's say if I keep this on only fans, xxnx. So a lot of these adult keyword terms, they do show up. Pornhub is here. So like you know we have keyword data on this on these different keywords and that's because we uh when we provide data estimates for all the keywords in our database we triangulate multiple like third party sources as well as Google's sources to make best effort estimates on the uh search volume. So that's how we we gain I cannot go into detail but basically we look into multiple um sources we buy data from these multiple sources to um estimate uh search volume okay and so that's why you see a specific number you don't see a range so if you use like Google keyword planner or something like usually you get you see like a range of like 10 to 10,000 or something which is not really useful Yeah. Uh, okay. So, and Ann asked the question and volunt. So, I think this is the last question I'll answer today. We have answered a lot of questions already. I think half of the audience is gone. So, I will answer this one key um the or at least two questions from Ann. Ann, if you're still here um I will answer your questions now. Uh should we focus now on longtail keywords and prompts in creating content and do traditional specific key targets not act just as supporting keywords? Um earlier in the webinar I mentioned about how it is more meaningful to focus less on like targeting specific keywords and more to using a tool a keyword research tool like keywords explorer to understand what topics and what questions or areas of knowledge that people in your industry want answers to. Right. So instead of just trying to focus for uh ranking for I think there were some examples earlier uh let's say uh small business entrepreneur. All right. So if I look into keywords related to that not many is not that popular of a keyword I mean industry. Um, but I get to instead of just targeting like small business entrepreneur examples, I can look into guides to being an entrepreneur at different ages. Uh, let's see if I can look for specific questions. For example, see like we have data on this now because people are really putting all kinds of longtail to to ask questions. or maybe we can look into related terms. So I'll like just go into these different uh reports and basically look into uh different steps required to being an entrepreneur. Like in this case it's about loan in this case it's about ideas how to hire people um popular business ideas grants that are given to businesses. these are like areas not necessarily like oh I should target free grants or or grants in this country and stuff like that which in of itself are just topics that you can that you can cover. So rather than like looking at oh you have to make sure that your headers have um these keywords or or like this section I have to look into what answers I make sure that I have to address the questions people typically ask. like a lot of this search volume is related to loans. So I may write content around it. And of course when you do that it is important to check your competitors. So for example this keyword how to get a small business loan. Uh I'm predicting that a lot of banks are giving yeah uh basically some websites like this and then I can check for discussions and forums that ask exactly this question and I can see what people answer and look into better ways in answering this question. So you to look at it like holistically like people are looking for ways to to uh take a loan to start a business. How can I create content or resources that can best assist them? Okay. So that's how I would look into Uh and then she had one final question related to risk in integrating GSSE and HF's web analytics. I guess the risk is about data in which case I can recommend you to look at our terms and conditions. Uh we do not leak identifiable information I think it's in privacy privacy policy data processing so it's these these two and security measures so I'll just link here uh it goes into detail about like um what are the terms with um using tools in our platform what we do with the data on the platform and what are the subprocesses that we use. So if we have we use additional um tools ourselves to provide service to you then how they process your data and and things like that. So for example here is information about the security measures that we do to uh manage to make sure that your data is secure and this is across the platform not just specific tools. Okay. So if you have any questions or concerns about that, you can refer to our documentation here. But in general, I mean, we are very like we we're very focused on making sure that there are no um you know security issues with um using our tools, make sure things don't leak. So we put in a lot of measures to help with that because that's trust with you as a user of our platform. Okay, I think that's all for the questions for today. Thank you everyone for joining us in today's webinar. I hope you find it useful to getting started on the platform and getting your questions answered so that you can uh move forward to improving your website's performance in search and AI visibility. Um and uh once again look forward to the recording if you need to rewatch some parts of it. And if you have any further questions, we have our live chat support as well as more webinars coming your way. We do about three of them every month. And uh there are to do with different parts. I hear it's mainly to cater to you guys new to the platform. But we also have webinars related to other stuff like specific to thought leadership about AI visibility or what how to create content or data studies and things like that. Okay. So definitely look forward to that in in the future. And meanwhile, um, enjoy using HRS and we hope that you can find success with our tool and we hope to see you guys in the next one. Okay, thank you everyone. Take care. Uh, head off for today and have a good week ahead. Bye.