Tim Soulo vs Glen Allsopp: Ahrefs Use Case Showdown

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome  to the Ahrefs' Usecase Showdown.   You're watching live from screens around  the globe. I am your host, Constance,   and tonight you are not just spectators.  Tonight, you are the judges. You will decide   who walks away victorious. You will crown the  champion. Tonight, we're not stopping at theory,   folks. This isn't just fluff. You'll be  witnessing real tactics, real use cases,   real value delivered by two of the most respected  minds in digital marketing. So, buckle up because   what you're about to witness will change  how you use Ahrefs forever. Two titans,   three rounds, and only one can claim the crown.  Let me introduce you to tonight's combatants. first fighting out of the blue corner. He joined  Ahrefs in 2015 as the first marketing hire. Today,   he is the chief marketing officer of a  company valued over hundred million in   AR. He helped build the empire by throwing  out the standard at SAS marketing playbook,   not tracking dozens of metrics or AB testing  or running drip campaigns. and he has spoken   at some of the largest industry conferences  around the globe. Pubcon, Brighton SEO,   Digital Marketers Australia, and he is also  the host of our very own Ahrefs podcast where   he takes no fluff, no nonsense interviews with  the most interesting people in marketing and   online business. Now, five seasons in,  ladies and gentlemen, the man who has   proven that great product plus great content  beats gimmicks anytime, Tim Soulo. [screaming] And now fighting out of the red corner.  This man has been reverse engineering   Google secrets since he was 16 years old.  By 19, he was working for an agency with   Land Rover, Nissan, and Hewlett  Packard as clients. By his mid 20s,   his own agency has generated over seven figures  in sales. He's the founder of detailed.com and   his SEO extension is used by 500,000 people  every single week. And his research on how   16 companies dominate 500 over websites in  Google search results was so influential   it was presented on stage by executives of multi  hundred million companies. Ladies and gentlemen, Let's go! Let's go! All right, folks. Let me  break down the rules of engagement. This showdown   consists of three rounds. In each round, our  competitors will present two Ahrefs' use cases,   two powerful tactics that you can take away  and use in your own work. In each round,   Tim goes first and Glenn goes second. After  both fighters have presented their use cases,   you, the audience, will vote. Which use case is  more powerful? Which tactic would you actually   use? Which one made you think, "I gotta try this  tomorrow"? The fighter with the most votes wins   the round. And then at the end of three rounds,  the fighter with the most votes will be crowned   the first ever Ahrefs Showdown champion. And  here's what makes it personal, folks. The   loser of tonight's showdown has pledged to donate  $500 to a charity of the winner's choice and will   be receiving the heat for their defeat in today's  arena on social media. Now that we know how things   are going to go down, Tim and Glenn, are you  ready? Yeah, let's go. Audience, I didn't expect   such a such an awesome introduction. Thank you,  Constance. Audience, are you ready? [cheering] Okay, show us who who's rooting for Glenn,   who's rooting for me. Put like  Glenn or team in chat. Yeah,   show in the chat. We need to know for you to know  who's rooting for who. [applause and cheering] We'll see what the audience prefers. Yeah,   friendship wins. Okay. [laughter] All right.  In that case, let the Ahrefs showdown begin! Round one, ladies and gentlemen, we are underway.  In this corner, Tim Solo set steps up to the plate   first. Tim, you can go ahead and take over the  share. Okay, let's go. The floor is yours. You   have eight minutes. I prepared I prepared a simple  presentation. Don't judge me. I'm not a designer.   So, this is a list of my favorite use cases.  They're not necessarily the most advanced ones.   They are not necessarily the most kind of  overlooked ones. These are my favorite. So   the the purpose of this webinar is for me and  Glenn to show you guys how we use Ahrefs and   what is our favorite use cases. And yeah, mine are  surely better than the ones Glenn will share. This   is a note on my slide. So the first use case I  want to present is this Site structure report   in Site Explorer. So here is where it is. We have  a tool called Site Explorer. I'm sure you're well   familiar with it. And once you put any website  there or any subfolder to be honest, you can   go to site structure uh report on the left and  you'll see this kind of tree that shows you the   essentially the structure of the website with all  the subfolders. And here you can see uh how many   pages in each subfolder. Uh so for example you  can see that for Ahrefs' blog, our blog subfolder   has uh 1,700 organic pages which are bringing  us 7.5% of total traffic to our blog. But what   you can see is that our Writing tools folder is  bringing us 21% of search traffic with 95 pages.   And I can expand this folder and see all the  actual writing uh writing tools, paragraph writer,   sentence rewriter, etc. So Site structure right  now is the report which I open first one whenever   I need to research a website. Whenever I discover  some company whose marketing I want to dig into,   or sometimes when I prepare for the podcast and  I want to study the company of my guest site   structure is the report I visit first. Previously,  it was top pages report but site structure gives   me a lot more insight a lot faster. And here  I have a nice link figuring out Zapier's SEO   growth. I remember that there was a case when  people on Twitter were discussing uh how Zapier   grew in their search traffic and with the Site  structure report just in about I know 5 seconds   as I see here by using the comparison mode I can  see that 115 new blog articles added plus 4.6   6 million in search traffic while the 3,000 new  applications in their applications folder didn't   move the needle. So yeah, inside structure  report you have this comparison mode where   you can compare the state of those subfolders of a  website between two timestamps. So you can go back   in time and see which subfolders grew. And here  you can clearly see that their blog grew by 6.44   million visits per month with just 115 new  pages and their applications folder there   were like 64,000 new pages I know with different  applications added and it only added them just   uh a little bit oh no sorry they they added 3,000  new applications so the change column is here   but it actually went down in organic search  traffic so yeah the last thing I wanted to   add is that site structure report is actually  available in our Google search console. Oh, I   cannot I cannot show you the Google search console  report of ahrefs.com because this would be kind of   a proprietary data of how much traffic our website  is getting actually. But yeah, if you have Google   Search Console connected to your Google account,  you don't necessarily want to know it for your own   website because like I'm saying here, you probably  know your own website pretty well. But if you are   a consultant or a freelancer or you're an agency  and you're working with clients and they give you   access to their Google search console which  you can connect to your Ahrefs account. The   first report I would go in our Google search  console tool is site uh site structure because   it quickly exposes their strategies. Let's go to  the second use case. The second favorite use case   is tracking homepage ch homepage changes with page  inspect. Sorry it has been a long day. So we're   closing site structure. So this is page inspect.  Here I have wynter.com which is essentially uh   a messaging research tool. I had Peep Laja,  the founder of wynter.com on the podcast and   I was actually researching his website wynter.com  before interviewing him and it is kind of getting   meta because he has a messaging research tool  and I was researching his messaging. So I was   researching the messaging of a messaging research  tool and in page inspect you have this nice   calendar view with a heat map and those squares  they show you how much changes we saw on a given   date. So you can see moderate changes, no changes,  moderate changes. And I can compare uh between two   dates. And as you can tell, I can clearly see that  previously the title of his homepage was on-demand   market research platform for B2B. But then later  he changed it the fast alternative to traditional   B2B market research. And as you can see, so I'm  checking wynter.com exact URL mode. So it looks at   the homepage and I can compare between any dates  and see how the messaging on their homepage has   changed. This is very very important if you're  crafting your own messaging, the messaging for   your entire company or maybe you're launching  some kind of product within your company and   you and you want to know how your competitors  present themselves and you also want to know   how their messaging has evolved over time like  what did they value last year and what do they   value this year or or you can actually identify  the exact time they started adding AI messaging   on their homepage which is right now a hot topic  for everyone. So yeah site structure, page inspect   report compare between two dates and you'll see  how their messaging changed and I would show   I will later show some other use cases for page  inspect but I guess that's it from me for now.   Let's give it to Glenn. Aaand that's it ladies  and gentlemen use cases one and two from Tim Solo! He's come swinging out with from first two use  cases, but the question is can Glen Allsopp   answer back? Glen, the the ring is yours. Eight  minutes on the clock. Show us what you got. Okay,   let's go. Thank you for the awesome introduction.  That was incredible. Okay, so let me just share my   screen. Let me know if everything's okay there.  Okay, I can see if you Okay, so all right. I   like this AI image better than the the main one. I  think I look a bit more I think I look a bit more   dangerous in this one. Okay so so the first thing  I want to show sorry my next slide is so round   one I'm going to talk about we all know about how  to target terms you know what are people ranking   for maybe I should create a page covering that  topic but what about when you've already covered   the topics that other websites are ranking for  so I'm going to start a bit slow here make Tim   think he has a chance and then I'm going to share  the second part of round one I'm going to share   something I haven't seen anyone discuss before so  um hopefully that's going to get a good reaction   all All right. So, what I love to do, so let's  open up Ahrefs, which got a website here. We can   see cars.com. Let me just move people out the way  a little bit. Um, so they're having some losses in   search traffic, but nothing crazy. It's a public  company, doing very well. Certainly had a good,   you know, end of 2025. So, what I like to do is  is see what's going on there. So, we can dive into   their organic keywords. I've just opened this up  in advance just because I only have a few minutes   to talk. And there's a few things I've opened in  advance. So first of all, I want to see rankings   that they have where someone else is also ranking  and the the highest DR of that page in the top   five results is up to 40. So the domain rating is  not too strong. The authority of the websites that   you're up against isn't too crazy. Word count from  four. You can also change the intent so that it's   non-branded if you want to just to get some more  specific niche terms. You can even no long terms.   You can even make this longer if you want to. But  the key thing I'm focused on, so let's just go   back to the slide for a second. Let's just say I'm  now thinking about I want to create videos and not   only have pages ranking, but what kind of videos  topics should I be covering that are relevant to   my niche and my competitor? What kind of products  are competitors showing up for? Should I be adding   more FAQ content to my pages? And can I see who's  actually showing up and people also ask and can   I get ideas there to improve my content? And just  another kind of trying to take over more sub real   estate. And that's really why I love this tool.  So, what I'm specifically looking for here is that   the current keywords, they include either a video  or a video preview. And we can go down and we can   see the list here for cars.com. And of course,  you can do this for any of your own websites,   any of the competitors, whatever is relevant to  your niche. And you can also see for these terms,   these, you know, they're getting more and more  traffic. So, just one example here. We can take   one of the first terms and we can see the video  carousel there. Now, what I really like about this   tool is that maybe you'll search for something  and maybe you won't actually see the videos there,   even though that's kind of, you know, you wanted  to be inspired to create videos and take over more   sub real estate. You can go into the term. So,  you can click on any of these phrases. You can   go into the page and here we've opened keywords  explorer. If you go down to the bottom here,   you can see what we actually saw in the search  results. So, you can change the dates for these.   So you can look into people also ask. You can look  into what video was actually showing up and get   some inspiration that way. So another example just  as I said this can apply to a lot of different   industries any kind of website you're competing  with. Again lowest domain rating, word count for   instead here I've changed the sub feature that  people also ask. So this is for zapia.com and   I can see the kind of pages and terms they're  ranking for in different locations where this   sub feature is present. So, and again, we can  dive into any one of those. Sorry, just hide.   Can't see my top bar at the moment. There we go.  We can dive into any one of those. And then we can   once again go down to the SERP feature and we can  actually see the people also ask results. So, what   was actually showing up there? Cuz maybe if you  search for yourself or you're targeting a location   that you're not in, you might not know what was  actually in those search results. You can see that   right here in the results. And it's really cool.  And then you can go into that specific page if you   want to. Let me just make this bigger. You can go  into that specific page and you can see the kind   of content they're writing. I'm definitely someone  who likes to get into the meat of it. So I'm going   to talk about the best dictation software. I  want to show the best dictation software. But   you can also, you know, later on you can have  additional commentary. The kind of thing that   might help you get uh into a people also ask sub  feature. So that's lots of different SERP features   you can go through and get more inspiration of  more search results or SERP real estate that   you can take over. So the second idea, I really  love this one and please maybe this is not your   um maybe this is not your example. I don't know if  other people can see that pop up there. Maybe this   is not your specific industry, but what I'm about  to show you it works in so many different niches.   works if you're selling products, experiences,  software, courses, events, whatever it may be. So,   you can go to search results and very clearly see  go to websites and see they are clearly promoting   something with affiliate links. So, we can go to  the telegraph here. They have a some kind of deal   with Booking.com. So, you search for the best  hotels in Santorini, they have affiliate links.   Now, it's a bit of a hassle. It's not the easiest  thing in the world to figure out all of the pages   on telegraph.co.uk, which not only promotes  something as an affiliate, but also rank. So,   what I love to do, and we can do this for kind of  any affiliate program, and just another another   example of a website here, they might be promoting  uh iHub. You can look in the bottom left in my   browser there. You can see a different kind of  affiliate link. What I really love to do, and of   course, the most popular one is Amazon. You can  take an affiliate link structure like I've done   here, and you can, you know, you want to add tags  to it if you're looking for a specific affiliate   um that's also ranking in Google. So I can see  these are all of the top traffic pages ranking in   Google that are promoting something as an Amazon  affiliate on their page. So not only can you   see what competitors are up to, but you can also  get more monetization ideas for content that you   already have or you can just find new products  to promote. And again, this doesn't just work   on Amazon. It works for any kind of affiliate  link that you can find. So as another example,   we have Booking.com. The example earlier, a  lot of people like to promote Booking.com.   I've changed the backlink type to incontent. So,  not only can you just search for the affiliate   style, which is aid, I believe, for Booking.com,  you can apply lots of other filters as well. So,   we can find, okay, the best beaches in  Thailand. They're promoting a booking   uh promoting the Novatel Hotel. Um, incredible  things to do in Singapore. Another one promoting   a hotel. And again, the thing I really love about  this page is that you can focus on the actual   traffic. So, not only do you know this page has an  affiliate link to something, as we can see here,   um we also know how much traffic they're getting,  then you can look into their rankings. And as I   said, it applies to events, experiences, hotels,  products, courses, whatever industry you're in.   If you find an affiliate link anywhere, you can  go and look up that in Ahrefs and see all of the   pages promoting it, all of the people ranking,  monetizing, potential extra terms for you to be   targeting. And then just one more example here  is that you don't necessarily have to do this. I   just love this this traffic focus. So it doesn't  necessarily have to be um something that is an   affiliate focus. You can look at all of the  websites that are driving the most potential   traffic. So we've got lending tree here. We've got  backlinks to lending tree. You can sort those by   page traffic as well. One little filter I like  to do, of course, there's different ways to look   up when something was published, but a lot of  websites still tend to put years in their URL,   so I like to do that as well. And again, we can  see things that are recently published, recently   linking to a competitor, getting a lot of traffic,  and maybe potentially sending a lot of traffic to   them. And one small little detail is that even if  the websites themselves, so let's just say someone   links to Amazon, but they actually go to their  own internal link first, Hrefs will pick that up.   So here's a good example here. They have a link  that ends up actually going through a redirect and   redirects to Booking.com. So even if someone isn't  using a traditional affiliate affiliate link,   we will find those as well because we track the  root of that page. Okay, that's me for round one. All right, I'm gonna go ahead  and take over the screen again... Four incredible use cases, two completely  different approaches, but only one person can   win this round. Audience, is your time to vote.  uh under it got launched a little early. So,   sorry about that. Disregard that. You should  be voting at this round that comes up. Okay,   you under polls and quizzes, you'll see the voting  options that will pop up. You will vote twice,   one for each use case pair and vote for the ones  where you believe was more powerful, more useful,   more likely to move the needle. You have one  minute to cast your vote. The clock starts now. [music] Constance, [music] how are you determining  the winner if uh on one use case I win and on   another one Glenn wins? It's a tie. [music]  It's a one to one, but yeah, we'll see. Sorry. Glad it's teams home arena. I like that. Yeah. And props [music] for Constance for such an  amazing vibe. all the webinar. [music] Did you say   sorry because you can see the votes or someone  wrote that? No, no, no. [music] I don't I don't   want to know until the end. Okay. And the votes  in Can you see the votes by the way? Do you guys   see the votes? I cannot see. We cannot. Yeah.  Okay. So, only I get to see the votes. And the   winner Oh my god. of round one is one second. It's  actually both of you guys. Uh because it is a tie.   It is a tie. Yeah, it is a tie. It's one to one.  Tim Soulo's Site Structure won as well as Glen's   Smart Monetization won the second one. Okay. Ah,  okay. [cheering] Let's move on. All right. Step it   up. Don't count yourself out. Champions are made  in adversity. So, let's move on. Round two. Stakes   are rising. The tension is building. Tim Solo gets  to strike first again. So Tim, the floor is yours.   Show us what else you got. Take it away. Okay,  let's go. So my third use case is finding branded   searches that your website doesn't rank for.  Because a lot of people go to their Google Search   Console to find their branded searches. But the  thing is in Google Search Console, you can only   see the branded searches where your website ranks.  This is the only way for Google to pick that up.   But what about branded searches where your website  doesn't rank? Well, for that you can use content   explorer because you can put your brand here like  I did. Ahrefs or key keywords explorer. Sorry,   I said Content Explorer. Keywords explorer. Uh,  by the way, I'm I'm not muted, right? You can   hear me. Yeah. Uh, I put my brand Ahrefs. Then I  went to matching terms to expose all the keywords   uh that we have with the word Ahrefs in them.  And then we have a cool filter called target.   So what I can do there is I can put my website  or you can put your website. Oh, I'm now seeing   the results of the poll. I'm putting my website  and there's a setting show keywords that target   doesn't rank for in top 100. I click apply. Well,  it's applied already. But while preparing for this   webinar, I actually discovered the bug because  as you can see here, the first keyword that I'm   shown is Ahrefs. And in position, it shows that  uh ahrefs.com doesn't rank for the keyword Ahrefs.   That's definitely a bug. I already checked in  with our developers and it turns out that Google,   as they usually do, changed their search results  pages and our parser kind of didn't pick it up,   but we already fixed the parser and they think  within uh maybe a couple hours, maybe a day,   we should update all of these keywords and uh  yeah, you'll be able to use that filter. Well,   but yeah, this is hilarious how uh you want to  show off a cool feature and suddenly it stops   working. But to give you a cool story because  of this feature because I was searching for   branded keywords that we don't rank for uh we  created this page Ahrefs group by get Ahrefs at   group by pricing with zero risk because we saw a  lot of people ranking for the keyword Ahrefs group   buy and we didn't rank for it because we didn't  have any content about it. So we decided to create   this fun page uh where we basically introduced our  $29 per month plan uh which is an alternative to   group buy. So this is just a fun fun way to play  around with this kind of keyword. And then I also   discovered that a lot of people are searching for  how to pronounce Ahrefs and we were not ranking   for this one. So uh those of you who follow me on  LinkedIn might remember when I asked our community   uh to say Ahrefs in the way they say it in their  countries and a lot of people submitted their   videos and we created this fun video of how people  around the world pronounce Ahrefs and embedded   this into this article how to pronounce Ahrefs.  So yeah, basically watching your branded keywords   that you don't rank for gives you a lot of cool  ideas of content that you can create around your   brand uh for people to discover and use. And yeah,  small bonus, uh, a lot of people don't know that   we have this handy first scene setting. Uh, it  shows the date when we first discover the given   keyword. So, for example, if I if I uh if I sort  all the keywords containing Ahrefs by first scene,   you can see that uh the most recent ones were  discovered like in February 13th February   2026. And yeah, we have comparisons with our  competitors. Ahrefs AI content helper official,   Ahrefs Brand Radar review 2026. So you can see  that these are super fresh keywords. And again   uh if your brand is any significant size where  people start searching for things and depending   your brand name, you might want to watch  what people are asking for in regards to   your brand. And yeah, like I said, you might  see these queries in Google search console,   but I think to the best of my knowledge in Google  search console, you cannot sort them by like first   scene. So this is a unique thing for Ahrefs. So  yeah, this is how you use keywords explorer to   monitor your branded searches where you don't rank  for your branded searches and what are the new   branded searches that appeared recently. And the  second use case of the second round again one of   my favorite things to do when I work with our  content team is correlating content updates   whenever we refresh our content or maybe content  refreshes uh I'm not a native speaker so pardon if   I'm saying it awkwardly uh with search performance  inside explorer. So the thing is like I'm saying   here no other marketing tool has this feature to  the best of my knowledge. So this is unique to   Ahrefs. Uh and basically if you go to top pages  report uh inside explorer. So here I have Ahrefs   blog top pages report it has a comparison mode  here. So I'm comparing the current date 26th of   February to previous three months. And here  I have this column called content changes.   And there's also I can see by color and actually  by the name moderate changes moderate overhaul.   So I can see that in the last three months because  I'm picking the last three months as my time frame   this article top Google s searches had a total  overhaul. So we changed a lot about it and I   can see that uh if I activate the uh wait yeah  changes so top Google searches changes plus 24. So   not much after after the top overhaul, it didn't  gain a lot of traffic, but you can also see that   uh on the site explorer overview page. So if  you put a specific URL and here in this like   three dots menu, you make sure that you activate  content changes, it would add these bubbles to   the graph. So on the graph, you can see how the  search traffic to this article has performed.   And here you can correlate. So you can see almost  every time we did overhaul changes, traffic went   up. It's just here it didn't went up for some  reason. But here again, we did an overhaul of   this article. Traffic went up. It went down, we  did an overhaul, it went up. So you can clearly   illustrate to your clients how you make changes  to specific pages. And you can illustrate how   after those changes, the traffic to this page is  growing. This is extremely visual and extremely   easy to prove your value to the client. So these  are two use cases from me for round two. Again,   uh the first use case was find branded searches  your website doesn't rank for and correlate   content refreshes with search performance inside  explorer. That's it from me for round two. All   right, ladies. Ladies and gentlemen, that is  the second set of use cases from Tim. So now, um   he's not holding back, but can Glen Allsopp match  that energy. Glen, the ring is yours. please take   over to share and show us what you've been saving.  Okay, let's go. Not bad. Not bad. We'll see. We'll   see how we respond to that. Okay. So, so as you've  probably seen, there's been a lot of discussions   about this on the internet about especially so  it's it's kind of taken over AI search temporarily   where there's a lot of so many best lists and  people recommending themselves and AI basically   sourcing and citing a lot of third party lists  where people are trying to get recommended on   those. But it's not really a new thing. It's kind  of always been in search results and it's still a   thing today. I don't want to call anyone out. Um,  I literally just Googled the first keyword that   came to my mind, which is best project management  software. And we can see PayO has an article on   the best project management software. And we can  see PayO is, you know, making that list. Another   one from Reich. I didn't open this article, but  I'm sure they're probably covering them. Um,   I've covered this and this this doesn't only work  or it's not only a thing in software like we have   examples for here. And by the way, this is good  way of being recommended and then a good day,   you know, list being I believe it's a list um  also being cited and sourced next to that next   to that recommendation. So whether you're selling  products, whether you're an agency, I did a lot   of research here, whether you are looking  for courses, not necessarily courses online,   but university courses and things like that,  um you will find these kind of recommendations,   these kind of lists. What I've done a study into  was how much they show up and they were very very   prominent. Our advice is kind of to try and lead  by example. They are less than 1% of our content.   There will never be more than that. Um we don't  always put ourselves in first place. We probably   never will. If you're going to write your own kind  of self-promotional list, please be incredibly   careful. Please do it incredibly sparingly. Um  and you definitely don't have to do it at all.   It doesn't have to be something you do. where  my focus would be would be creating something   so good and marketing yourself so well. Um the  ideal situation is that you get on the lists of   other people rather than worrying about creating  your own stuff. So yeah, definitely don't go   overboard with this in any in any way, shape or  form. So I want to be on third party list. That   is my that is my priority rather than creating my  own. And Ahrefs has a tool that makes it really,   really, really easy to see all of the lists that  your competitors are on that are getting traffic   that have been getting back links that you are not  on yourself. So, if you open up the menu here, you   can click on competitive um competitive analysis.  It was just here on the left. And you've got a lot   of options. You can look for keywords they're  ranking for, paid keywords, referring domains,   or referring pages. So, the one we care about is  referring pages. So I've opened this up in advance   just to be quick and be useful. So as a simple  example we have so my target website is a Asana   one of my competitors is Wrike just an example  and very quickly so what I've done over here and   this is kind of the magic of this idea is that all  this tool is doing is looking at links one website   has that the other one doesn't have. The way I've  made it more practical and interesting for this   use case is I've said it can match any of these  rules that the page linking to Wrike which does   not link to Asana. So we can see Asana doesn't  have links from any of these pages must contain in   its title tag either the word best or recommended.  Now if you have another language if you Spanish   or Dutch or Japanese whatever it may be you  can change these to what is relevant for your   industry. Now I can go through these lists and the  7,000 URLs here. You can export them. You can play   with them in different ways that you like. We've  ranked them here by page traffic. So you can see   some of these we are estimating and there's a  lot of the same website here. Some of these we   are estimating. Wrike is getting a ton of mentions  across this whole entire domain. If you don't have   a relationship with this website and there's this  network of websites, it might be one you want to   start because they are getting some great press on  these lists. And that's some someone I'd want to   um know and connect with in some way. We've got  lots of other websites here. people, managing   people, CPO club, and again, you can change these.  And what I really like about this tool is if you   have your own website in here, but you can't think  of some competitors in the moment. If you just   click in one of these fields, oh, of course, it's  not going to do it as soon as I'm uh recording a   webinar. Let me uh let me hide the first one. All  right. I think it's cuz I had the page pre-loaded.   Let me just change this real quick just to see if  I can get that to show. Let's do cars.com. There   we go. So, if you have um yeah, don't close your  tabs and come back to it 10 minutes later. So,   if you put in your target website, then you're  going to get a list of competitors instantly. You   don't have to think of them. We're going to pull  that from our database. Just super useful. And we   can go to these pages. I won't I won't bore you  with the whole thing, but this Ganttpro article,   there's only one mention of Asana and that  is in a testimonial. It is not a link,   but it does mention Wrike. Another example here  um we we can see Wrike here on CPO club but there   is no mention of Asana and you can go and build  relationships connect with these websites and get   some opportunities there. And just another way to  do this if you don't want to think of the words in   a title this is just something we launched last  month it's really cool it's been really popular   is you can now select page types. So instead of  having to think of what words are actually in   the title you can just search for listicles in the  page type filter and you can search for categories   as well And you can see all of these different  pages that Reebok are getting mentioned on. Um   discounts for different um professions, top shoes,  men should own, you know, these are the kind of   lists and people linking out from their websites  that you might want to build relationships with.   Tidleist again, more examples, all of these  different kind of lists because we have this page   filter in place. You don't have to think of any of  the terms. And then um is that titles again? Oh,   I changed. So another option maybe you don't want  to look at listicles, you want to look at reviews.   So, who's actually reviewing a product, reviewing  your competitor? Maybe you want to send them your   products, maybe you want to reach out, maybe you  want to have them on your podcast, whatever it may   be. So, that is my first one. And then I'm going  to switch over to Firefox for this next one. Wait,   let me just show what I'm going to talk about.  So, this one is pretty special. Um, so if you've   ever lost search traffic and you want to know  who's taken over that search traffic instead,   this is a really, really cool way to be able to  do that. So, let me go back into Firefox. So, we   have Nerd Wallet open here. We can see not a crazy  drop, right? I I don't want to show anyone having   big troubles or anything like that on the webinar,  but we can see they've lost some traffic and some   rankings since the last time we up updated their  numbers. So, what you can do, we can go into   organic keywords here on the left. We can look at  positions that they've lost. I'm not so interested   in terms that include their brand name. And I've  got the word count here as four. So I can see over   a million keywords that we've been tracking. Now  these aren't always in the US. It might be India,   Canada, Spain, whatever it is that they have lost  rankings for. Now if this is your website, if   this is your client, if this is your competitor,  what you may be wondering, well, if they lost the   rankings, who took all of that traffic? So what  you can do, you can take all of these keywords   if you like. Um, you can select all of them or  you can just select 50. And what you can do,   you can add them to a keyword list. And then if  you take that list into another tool of ours,   Keywords Explorer, you can figure out exactly  where that traffic has gone. Now, I didn't want   to focus too much on Nerd Wallet. I didn't think  that would be fair to them on a webinar with a   lot of people, but I have my own little keyword  list here. If this sidebar looks weird, I'm just   hiding some of the words. This isn't normally  how Ahrefs looks. Um, so what I've done here,   I've took a list of 500 keywords that matter to an  industry I care about. I've put them inside Ahrefs   keyword explorer. And what I can do is I can go to  traffic share by domain. So you could have taken   all of those keywords that they lost traffic  for. You put them in a list, put them in this,   click on buy domain here and you will see all  of the websites that are taking that traffic and   taking those rankings. So in the best software  space we can see Reddit dominating Gartner, G2,   whoever it may be. And what's really cool is you  can compare it. So you can check versus a month   ago who is actually getting even more traffic.  who else is losing traffic for these terms that   we care about and who's actually gaining traffic.  And then what's really useful about this angle,   as I'm sure you've heard, especially with AI  search these days, is that we really want to   get on as many good quality third-party sources as  possible. So websites like Reddit, websites like   G2, what I love doing is taking all the keywords  I care about and looking at all the Reddit pages   ranking for those terms. So, um, we've got 900  plus pages here ranking for the 500 terms I care   about. These are all the Reddit threads that we  found showing up in Google for those terms. These   are the terms that we found them for. This is the  estimated traffic. What you could go and do then,   and of course, please don't spam anything  and be careful about your brand. You can go   to these pages, see which ones are open. Maybe  people are already talking about your company   and your software, and you can get involved in  these discussions. And it's not just Reddit. You   might get ideas for videos to create. you might  get ideas whereas um Facebook groups might be   discussing you. You can get in on the comments  and just to reiterate these are all ranking in   Google for terms you've either lost traffic  for or you really care about and you can get   involved in those and try and recoup some of  that and and build your brand in the process. Okay. Is that is that the end? Yeah, that's  it. Sorry. All right. Awesome. Okay. I will go   ahead and uh take over. All right, you've  been witnessing greatness here tonight,   folks. Two phenomenal use cases from each uh  competitor and two additional weapons from   each competitor that you the audience  can use in your arsenal. But again,   only one person can take this round. So  audience, the voting starts one second now. It's a good [music] thing that in the first  round we had a tie because it would if it   would be uh [music] two rounds for  Glen, it would be kind of knockout [music]   Okay. Oops. Uh, and the voting [music] is over.  One second. And the winner of round two is Glen Allsopp! Wow. Nice. Nice. Thank you everyone.  comparing the results of the of the poll. So,   just the first one Glen edged out just slightly  and the second one he completely took it. It   was pretty awesome. Yeah, I think uh is it uh  is it that people didn't like my correlating   content changes to content to traffic growth or  glance who took your rankings was too strong. So,   I wonder which is it because yeah, the first  one we're very close. Yeah. Uh I think like I   mean e all the use cases were really really good  this time around. So we'll see. All right. Yeah,   there are a couple couple interesting comments  in the chat I'm seeing. So first of all, yeah,   we'll we'll keep doing this I don't know monthly  or not, but we will uh have some other people come   here like Patrick versus Ryan or Louise versus I  don't know Despina. So yeah, more people would uh   would do these kind of battles of their favorite  use cases. So, we're going to continue the series   for sure. And someone is saying that it would  be great to write an article with all the use   cases. Uh, I think we can actually try using AI  to do it. I wonder if AI can take this transcript   and write an article. We will of course of course  polish it. But yeah, we'll definitely turn this   uh this webinar this this battle rather into an  article. Okay. Awesome. All right. Round three.   Final round. Everything has been building up to  this moment. Every tactic and insight with these   final four use cases, two for each uh fighter,  everything is on the line. Again, we'll go with   Tim to begin his round. So, take it away and  take over the show. Okay. Uh championship round,   the final one. So uh the the next two use cases  or the first of the next two use cases is using   content explorer for finding brand mentions.  Yeah. First of all uh I think that content   explorer is the most overlooked tool in Ahrefs in  general. Whenever people are asking me like what's   the least like what's the tool that deserves more  attention but does it get it? I always say content   explorer. And now in the era of AI and in the era  of AI visibility where you want to get cited by   LLMs, you cannot put all your eggs into the basket  of your own website. You need to have massive   presence on other websites because when LLMs  create their answers, they don't pull just from   your website. They pull from a lot of websites.  And content explorer is great for finding where   you already mentioned. So for example, what  I did here, I went to content explorer. I put   our brand name Hrefs and I was looking for  all of the pages that mention Hrefs anywhere   in the content and I applied a few filters. So  first of all, I only focused on English pages   because we we are also mentioned in a lot of  other languages. Then I of course filtered   explicit results because internet is a nasty  place and uh spammers would gener autogenerate   text and your brand would show up in all sorts  of bad pages. So it's better to keep this turned   on. Then a very useful filter. So website that is  hosting the page that mentions Ahrefs should have   at least 10,000 visits per month from search.  This is a great filter again to filter out all   sorts of uh all lowquality websites, all the  I don't know PBNs and whatnot. Uh so this is   a great great filter to use to increase the  quality of your results. And then in the end,   yeah, I also uh limited the publish date. So when  these pages were published to the last 30 days.   So I want to know all the pages where Ahrefs was  mentioned in the last 30 days. And they get pretty   a lot of them, 455 pages. So I I could probably  use more filters. For example, um page traffic   or domain rating or referring domains to further  drill down into results. But the very first page   is quite interesting. Uh claude.com connectors  Ahrefs. I can immediately see that uh we we have   published our connector at claude.com and this  showing up here. Oh, by the way, I can exclude   our own website ahrefs.com. For that I just need  to do this minus site h oops sorry Ahrefs.com hit   search. Oh all the filters are left intact which  is pretty cool. Yeah and now it's not showing   uh our own website uh which is very useful but  yeah claude page is the first one. So yeah uh you   want to do this with your competitors. So you want  to know all of the places where your competitors   get mentioned because yeah it's one thing to use  AI visibility tool like Brand Radar and see the   actual citations that LLMs are using today but  the thing is tomorrow LLMs won't necessarily use   the same citations and if your competitors will  get a strong mention on a strong website it would   probably show up as a citation tomorrow. So you  want to be one step ahead. You want to put your   competitor here and you want to consistently  monitor all the websites where they show up.   And again there is no again I'm biased but there  is no better tool to track something like this   because Ahrefs as you know crawls the entire web  has an index has a fresh index of the entire web.   So we are a great source of this data and we keep  improving the content explorer index. By the way,   uh if you know that you or your competitor got a  mention on some strong page, but it's not showing   up in content explorer, please report it to  our customer support. We want to know this.   We want to fix this because right now with the  move of marketing and SEO to AEO, answer engine   optimization. We're putting a lot of effort in  this database uh and in this product specifically   because we we understand how important it is for  our customers. And other than brand names, you can   actually put any keyword. So for example, if you  have I don't know a productivity app. You can put   the word productivity here. So productivity and  you'll see you'll see all the pages that mention   productivity according to your filters. And  yeah, this is vastly more pages 42,000 pages that   mention productivity. So you want to know, you  want to add more filters. you may maybe might want   to exclude some keywords etc etc etc. But again  for outreach if you have an agency that is doing   outreach or if you have an outreach specialist in  your team this is a gold mine of opportunities of   websites to reach out and feature your own your  own brand. So this is incredibly incredibly useful   especially for answer engine optimization. Uh  so this was use case number five and the last   one the last use case uh using YouTube index in  Brand Radar to find channels to sponsor. So again   this is this is useful for brand awareness. So  if you want to promote your brand, if you want to   uh if you want more people to learn about  your brand, YouTube is a great platform to   get visibility for your brand and uh specifically  sponsoring YouTube creators so that your uh your   product your brand would show up in their videos.  How do you do this? So for example, what I did   here, I'm searching for Squarespace in YouTube  index of brand radar. And as you can see uh so   specifically I'm using filter. I'm I'm searching  for Squarespace in descriptions of videos because   typically when a video gets sponsored, they have  this blurb in the description like the video is   sponsored by Squarespace blah blah blah. So, for  example, here try Squarespace free for 2 weeks.   Uh there's affiliate link blah blah blah and we  have 2,000 videos in our database which again   uh right now as you can see YouTube visibility is  in beta. So, we're still populating this index.   We're still growing it. And yet we have 2,000  videos mostly coming from all sorts of different   channels. So yeah, Squarespace's own website, Kill  Tony, Cantomando, doesn't matter. So basically   I know which channels accept sponsorships like  Squarespace and I can get featured there. So this   is very very useful. But also you can search in  the actual transcripts of the videos. So this is   again very useful for answer engine optimization  because those systems they would pull from YouTube   as well. And if there's a lot of content  that is mentioning your competitor's brands,   your competitor's products or actually the  problems that your product is solving, you   can find all those videos easily with our YouTube  index and Brand Radar and you can reach out to the   owners of those channels and figure out some kind  of partnerships. Maybe they would do a review of   of your product. maybe you would sponsor their  channel. It's it's for you to decide. But yeah,   if you're working with sizable brands who uh  are eager to work with influencers on YouTube,   this YouTube index on of Brand Radar is a gold  mine for opportunities for channels to sponsor.   And that's it from me. Two use cases. Um again  the first use case is using content explorer to   find pages where your competitors are mentioned  or which are mentioning your industry keywords.   And the second one is using brand radar YouTube  index which is essentially the same use case as   in content explorer but content explorer finds  you pages and websites and uh brand radar   YouTube index finds you YouTube videos and YouTube  channels. That's it. All right. All right. So then   we go to the final uh side of round three. Glen,  this is your moment. Leave it all in the ring and   take it over. All right, let's go. Oh, I feel the  pressure now. Final round. Okay, [ __ ] my screen. Okay, so for the final round, I have I'm going  to share something in the second half of this   that I've never talked about also and I think is  really special. First, we're going to talk about   something. It's kind of a simple idea, but the  what Ahrefs does with all the filters that we   have available makes this really special. So, the  simple idea is I want to see what are all the new   terms that competitors are ranking for that they  weren't ranking for before and get inspiration   for those. So, very simple idea, something you've  been able to do for a long time. But the filters   that we have in place just make this really,  really cool. So, just a random example here,   public company. It always feels fair, right? I  talk about those when I give examples and I didn't   want to show anyone losing a ton of traffic. So,  we can see that traffic is going up here for car   gurus. Uh they've talked about this on earnings  calls which I love to follow as well. Um just   really seeing a lot of uh growth over the past  year or so. So, what we can do is we go into their   organic keywords and the filters I have here are  those that I really think make this special. So,   not only are we looking for new keywords, but I'm  looking for new keywords they're ranking for that   they weren't ranking for before. And they must  be in the first three positions in Google. So,   not just, you know, page 2, three, four. Um,  I really want they they came from nowhere and   now they're dominating that search result. I've  changed the language. You can change the language   to whatever you want. We focused on intense.  Lots of different options here. Transactional,   informational. I want non-branded because of  course they're going to rank for anything to   do with their name. Maybe they've released  a new product. This is also special. So,   we don't want the the domain rating of the  pages that are um the pages that are ranking   alongside it for these same terms. We don't want  those uh being too authoritative that we might   not have a chance to rank ourselves. So, lots of  different terms here. Get inspiration. You can add   word count. You can see how much traffic growth  they've gotten for those pages. And kind of like   Tim's site structure idea, uh, concept he talked  about at the start, you can get an idea of, oh,   maybe they've started covering a new area like  Fort Worth. You can export these and give them   to your favorite LLM and ask them for any kind of  commonalities in the answers. So, you can really   do a lot with this data. So, it's not just the  automotive space. I have another example here.   I've done the change the word count. So, I've  added the word count ASOS in the fashion space.   We can see they're suddenly starting to rank for  all of these different kind of products. Maybe   they've added more kind offormational content.  Why are they ranking for these kind of pages? You   can get a lot of inspiration um from that. I have  one open I think here already. Yeah. So, what you   can do is you can click into any of these pages  just like I showed before. Any of these keywords,   sorry. And here's the example page. And you  can see all of the locations is ranking in   the keyword difficulty. They were ranking. We had  them ranking nowhere and now we have them ranking   second in Google. Like what did they do here? Is  that have they been changing the page? You can go   use page inspect and see the change history. And  then you can click on those keywords and you can   see okay when we saw them ranking first and sorry  this is where we so we clicked on the keywords.   We open up keyword explorer. We can see where  they were ranking. You know was it part of the   image pack? What kind of sub feature the other  pages that are ranking? And because I had that   domain rating filter, there must be someone was  it in the top five results with a domain rating   of less than 30. We can see that there maybe gives  you a bit of confidence that maybe you could rank   for something similar like that if you have a  less authoritative website. So just a couple more   examples. Linus Tech Tips. You can do the same.  See all the new keywords that they're ranking for   at a specific date. Dive into the site structure.  Dive into, you know, is this from their forums?   Did they suddenly start selling new products? Can  you get inspired to do something else? So, that's   part one of the last round, and I've left probably  my favorite one for last, and hopefully it is   something you guys enjoy as well. So, I am kind  of obsessed with keeping track on competitors in   lots of different industries. And Ahrefs has three  really, really cool ways to be able to do this. So   in the standard UI, and we're going to talk about  the MCP and the API briefly. In the standard UI,   we have this tool called batch analysis. So you  can put up to a thousand pages in here. They can   be subdomains, subfolders, regular websites. They  can be individual URLs, and you can get data on   all of these URLs at once. So I shouldn't try and  type too much on a webinar. I'm sure I'm going to   make some typos as I'm going, but just to put  in a few examples. um nerdwallet.com/uk just to   and automatically look I didn't have to tell it  hey I'm looking for a path here it automatically   upload updated that smartsheet.com so let's just  keep it simple for now I'll click on analyze and   I'm going to get a ton you see how quick that  was right this is all real time um I am going   to get a ton of data on these websites so how many  keywords do they have in the top three where are   they getting the most traffic from so notion it is  South Korea interestingly um the keywords we see   that Nerd Wallet isn't actually buying. Oh, sorry.  One thing I did wrong there is I should have put   www. Give me one sec. Should update quickly as  well. So, one thing we will see for nerd wallet   is where they are not buying uh oh they are buying  ads now. All right. So, we got the proper domain   there. We have so where they buying ads, what kind  of expected expense, referring domains, what kind   of backlink situation do they have? Now what I  what my situation here I do is I want to really   take advantage of that thousand URL limit. So I'll  have different folders, different subdomains and   you can save these anywhere, right? So you can  always copy and paste them and easily put them   in a batch analysis. And what I will do every week  or every two weeks depending on how many websites   you're checking, I will take a kind of snapshot of  this so you can export it and then two weeks from   now I'll set myself a reminder in my calendar. go  check this again and then I'll compare it. So you   don't have to open dozens of tabs looking at all  these different websites manually and trying to   check all of the charts in site explorer. You  can use batch analysis and you compare the two   results and you can see um okay monday.com's now  getting 800,000 monthly visitors from Google. Two   weeks ago it was 750,000. And then maybe you'll  dive into site explorer uh site structure, sorry,   the new keywords that they're ranking for. So  again, I'm just showing a couple of examples here,   but please push this to the limit. Please put  in a 100 URLs, 200 URLs, subfolders, subdomains,   who is crushing it with a certain section of their  website that you that you know you're competing   with. Is there a certain folder that's taking  off? And then uh just one more example here,   another industry. And another thing that might  be interesting to me is not just where how much   traffic they're getting, but maybe sudden suddenly  someone's starting running ads, which they weren't   doing before. So in your past export you will  see there's no ads now they suddenly are now   you know instead of manually clicking on ads every  week inside explorer for one website you can get   this big overall view and what's really cool I  don't know if any of you guys have played with   it this is really growing fast I've seen the  user numbers recently and we're we're really   happy with the the usage here of our MCP what you  can do if I just go back to PowerPoint here. So,   we have two options. Everyone, whether you're  on Lite, Standard, or Advanced Ahrefs plans,   you will get credits now every single month.  No extra cost that you can use our MCP. So,   if you don't want to use the standard AI, maybe  you want to go and ask more questions. So, if   you see credit comma now, it suddenly has a ton of  backlinks. You can ask the MCP in context in chat,   hey, what what kind of links did they pick up? How  how different is that compared to a month ago? And   where where were they coming from? And if you  don't want to work with the MCP, if you're also   a developer, you have access to our API, you can  also, this is ignore my design, just something I   was playing around with. Maybe not all of those  fields were interesting to you. So instead of   manually running a batch analysis every two weeks,  you could automate it and you could get alerts and   send yourself messages when something actually  starts ranking better and um starts picking up   a lot more keywords that they're ranking for.  So please push this to the limit. Literally   put in a 100 URLs that you care about. Check them  every two weeks. You're going to get so many good   insights here that you wouldn't get just manually  clicking around. All right, that is my final jab   for round three. All right. All right. Going to  go ahead take over here. So, all 12 use cases   have now been delivered, folks. What a battle.  But for now, the fate of this showdown rests in   your hands. Audience, now you are casting your  final votes. Make it count. You have one minute. Oops. Wait, wait, wait. Whoa, whoa, [screaming] whoa, whoa.  Sorry. Yeah. [laughter] [snorts] Will we have the the final word for the winner and   the loser? Uh we we will have  Yeah, we'll have final word. The next one we need to bring some [music]  professional ring announcer like Bruce Buffer   or something to to interview us. Maybe Joe  Rogan would want to join the webinar. [music] Oh, the the name of my use case is is incorrect.   I wasn't giving keywords. [music]  It's uh it's content explorer. Yeah,   my my first use case was content explorer  for [music] answer engine optimization. and for brand reputation. Yeah. All right. Uh, one second. Just moving around  a few screens here. Ladies and gentlemen,   what we have witnessed tonight is nothing short  of extraordinary. Two titans in the SEO world,   two masters of their craft, 12 incredible  use cases. Both fighters left everything in   the ring tonight. Both demonstrated why they're  among the most respected voices in the industry.   But only one can emerge victorious. The votes  have been counted. The audience has spoken. And so ladies and gentlemen, a winner. Come on. Your  [screaming] champion. This is awesome. Glad a So what were the results of the first  round? Here [music] you go. Awesome. Oh,   so you got me. You got me on the first  try. Yeah, on the first one I got you,   but on the second one. So, [music] yeah, it's a  tie. So, we have two tie rounds [music] and one   round where Glen won. So, it's like a winner by  split decision. Yeah, it was actually a closer   fight than I thought it was going to be. It's  It's not a career ending victory. [laughter] So, Glen, let's give word to to the winner  to Glen. Do you want to take the Thank your   parents and and such. Yeah, thank you. I was  literally going to say that. Thank you. Thank   you, my friends, my family, everyone who  believed in me for today's event. Uh yeah,   I've been working 21 years just to get to this  moment in SEO. So, [laughter] thank you all. I I   uh I sincerely appreciate it. This was very fun.  Thank you to Tim. You came up with the idea. Um   and and Constance, you really took it to the  next level. I really I really appreciate the uh   the uniqueness you made out of this. So that was  really cool. Thank you everyone. I hope I hope you   got a lot out of it. It was uh awesome to put this  together. It was a lot of fun. Uh and as pledged,   Tim will be donating $500 to Dog Trust UK.  That's his charity of choice. Now we know the   the hap the thank yous and comments are Wait,  can I also have a word? Come on. The loser is   also from the loser. It's a word from the loser  here. So yeah, thanks a lot for the audience for   coming. Thanks. Thanks a lot to everyone who  cheered for me. Uh I did my best. It's a split   decision victory. I only lost in one round. The  other rounds I managed to perform well. Uh yeah,   no excuses. Uh next time we'll face I'll face  Glenn. We'll have a rematch and I'm going to win.   But thank you for coming. All right. Um before  we close out this historic event, a few important   announcements. A lot of people asked this  question. If you want to relive the magic,   um you can or share it with your colleagues who  missed out. The full live stream will be available   on YouTube after this webinar ends. You watch it,  share it, and send it to anyone who likes to watch   like especially people in the US time zone. I  think they won't be able to attend. Uh which is a   bummer. But uh I have good news for that. And the  second thing is when you close out this webinar,   you will receive a feedback form. Uh please take  a moment to share your thoughts. Your feedback   helps us make these events even better. And who  knows, it'll also influence who we bring next   into the ring for future events. Okay. And we  have one final announcement. You didn't think   this was a one-time event, did you? Tim already  spoiled it earlier, but that's okay. In March,   the Ahrefs Showdown will return and we'll have two  new combats stepping into the ring. Content versus   technical, strategy versus structure. Ryan Law  versus Patrick Stox. Join us back again on 26th   March for the next Ahrefs use case showdown. So,  mark your calendars and tell your friends because   you do not want to miss the next installment of  Ahrefs showdown use case showdown series. Okay,   once again, I would like to take a moment to  thank our incredible competitors. Tim Soulo,   thank you for bringing the heat tonight. Thank you  for sharing the tactics straight from the HS war   room. Yeah, Glenn Allsopp, thank you for pulling  back the curtain. And you showed us how you showed   us how to get untapped insights from data reports.  It's a matter of how one wields their tools. And   to our wonderful audience, thank you for voting  and thank you for joining us today and thank you   for making this app first ever Ahrefs use case  showdown one for the history books. This has   been I've been your host Constance. Uh please  scan the QR code if you'd like to register for   next month's use case showdown. And until next  time, keep building, stay hungry, and we'll see   you next time in the ring. Thank you guys for  coming. Thank you everyone. Thank you so much. Yeah. Okay. So, we'll go ahead and  end the webinar, everyone. Thank   you so much. Uh we'll see you guys in the  next one. Take care and bye-bye. Byebye.