my reaction too!

boooooo

there's bias here (the very nature of an "AI content survey" will attract people who are using AI), but still... wow.

are you using AI in content marketing? are you NOT? i would love to hear about your experiences

fill out this survey and have your say:
ephbu45foaj.typeform.com/ahrefssurvey

i think back to just a couple of years ago, and content marketing was something that could ONLY be done by skilled people.

now, almost everyone is using generative AI in some capacity. what an insane change!

i'm aiming for a few hundred more responses before i analyze and write a full research report... and i'll share it with you, of course :)

typeform link here: ephbu45foaj.typeform.com/ahrefssurvey

if you have a few minutes spare, i would love to hear YOUR experience using (or not using!) generative AI in SEO and content marketing.

we'll aggregate the data and report on exactly how AI is being used, how often, how good it is, and where content budget is being spent.

inspired very heavily by my favourite wikipedia page: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-te...

ah very cool, hope you find something useful! i did some stuff like median clicks/impressions, let me know if you come up with any cool ideas :)

no great surprises from this, but it does open the door to potentially interesting cohort analyses (clicks/links/impressions by business potential score etc)

might be a fun exercise for a company very big into ToFu traffic or else struggling to generate customers from SEO/content marketing

13/ i will leave you with two questions:

what would i do if the diminishing returns of "traditional" SEO content came faster and harder than i expected?

how would i attract attention, add value, and make people care about my company if i couldn't rely on simple information arbitrage to do the job?

12/ some small percentage of "SEO content" has truly made the information landscape richer for its existence, but it's a very small percentage. from a user perspective, i think generative search is a good thing.

11/ we are people who have something to lose in this situation, but if we put aside our biases, it's hard to see the emergence of generative search as a bad thing.

10/ most SERPs are always, and have always, been crammed full of some mixture of irrelevant information, heavy-handed "marketing" content, or plain misinformation. generative search is often wrong, but so is traditional search—and generative search FEELS so much better. it will win. it is winning.

9/ and what does "wrong" mean anyway? what are we drawing comparison to? compare the "wrongness" of generative search to the state of "traditional" search. we're wearing rose-tinted glasses.

8/ the Google/Reddit partnership reinforces the point that vast amounts of content are created every day with no financial incentives whatsoever. these generative models will always have a vast corpus of cutting-edge discourse to imbibe. UGC is the leading edge for informational queries.

7/ the remaining gaps and edge cases—niche topics, emerging topics, revisions to existing information—will be closed even if the monetary incentives for creating SEO content disappear overnight.