Home / Research
Archive Ahrefs checked Mention.com's January 2016 move from subdomain to subfolder in Site Explorer. Traffic shifted, and only new content produced growth.
Sep 25 · Ahrefs
Amsive tracked about 400 sites hit by the September 2023 Helpful Content Update and found no known significant recoveries by late March 2024.
Sep 24 · Amsive
Ahrefs tracked 1,885 pages that added JSON-LD against matched controls. Here is the method, the citation changes by platform and the limits.
Sep 24 · Ahrefs
HTTP Archive's 2025 Web Almanac measured HTTPS on 97.3% of mobile homepages and 98.8% of requests. What the crawl method can and cannot show.
Sep 23 · HTTP Archive
Ahrefs checked the age of top 10 pages for 1.3 million US keywords: 72.9 percent are over three years old, and the average number one page is five.
Sep 23 · Ahrefs
Backlinko's 11.8M-result study found shorter URLs correlate with slightly better Google rankings. Here is the method, the numbers and the limits.
Sep 23 · Backlinko
Ahrefs' 384,614-page study isolated exact, phrase, partial and random-match anchor text and found every correlation with rank was weak.
Sep 22 · Ahrefs
Backlinko and Ahrefs analyzed 11.8 million search results and found no correlation between page HTML size and Google rankings.
Sep 21 · Backlinko
SearchPilot's aggregate split tests found FAQ schema was positive 67% of the time, with organic traffic uplifts of 4-15% while the rich result existed.
Sep 20 · SearchPilot
Ahrefs tracked backlink growth for 200,000 pages across 10,000 keywords and found no observable link between acquisition pace and ranking movement.
Sep 19 · Ahrefs
Ahrefs correlated 12 metrics with brand mentions in ChatGPT, AI Mode and AI Overviews: web mentions beat backlinks, and it warns of no causation.
Sep 18 · Ahrefs
Bing's study found 18% of sitemaps with lastmod set it wrongly, usually to the generation date, and Google says it uses only accurate ones.
Sep 18 · Bing Webmaster Blog
A 36-method academic benchmark found paragraph-based chunking nearly doubles retrieval accuracy over naive fixed-size splitting across six domains.
Sep 18 · arXiv
Ahrefs compared the age of 16.975 million URLs cited by AI assistants against organic Google results. Here is the method, the numbers and the limits.
Sep 18 · Ahrefs
SE Ranking tracked 100,000 keywords in 20 niches and measured Reddit's share of Google's top three results. This piece reviews its method and limits.
Sep 18 · SE Ranking
Sistrix analyzed 80 million keywords and found position 1 averages 28.5% CTR, ranging from 13.7% to 46.9% depending on the SERP layout.
Sep 18 · SISTRIX
A randomized Chrome-extension experiment hid AI Overviews for 1,065 searchers. This piece analyzes Agarwal and Sen's SSRN study of the CTR impact.
Sep 16 · SSRN (Saharsh Agarwal, Indian School of Business; Ananya Sen, Carnegie Mellon University)
SearchPilot ran a real controlled SEO split test on author bylines and bios. Result: no detectable ranking gain, and possibly a small loss.
Sep 16 · SearchPilot
A SearchPilot split test added 301 redirects atop an existing canonical tag for trailing-slash duplicates. The result stayed inconclusive.
Sep 16 · SearchPilot
Botify's case study of a US auto marketplace: 99% of pages uncrawled, then 19x more crawl activity after linking, robots.txt and sitemap fixes.
Sep 16 · Botify
Ahrefs found a 33.4% title rewrite rate, far below Zyppy's 61.6% and Search Engine Land's 76%. The gap traces to how each study defines a match.
Sep 16 · Ahrefs
We read the robots.txt of 60 publishers and SEO vendors. News sites block AI crawlers almost universally. The SEO industry does not.
Sep 10 · SEO Madman
Google has enforced its site reputation abuse policy since May 2024. Here is what is documented versus what is anecdotal case tracking.
Aug 28 · Google Search Central
Zyppy's 23-million-link study and Google's own crawling documentation show why pages with few internal links struggle to get discovered and clicked.
Aug 15 · Zyppy
Google's own review-snippet documentation names exact required properties and abuse rules. Markup that passes a property check can still break the rules.
Aug 4 · Google Search Central
rel=next/prev has been dead as an indexing signal since 2019, per Google's own words. Infinite scroll without real URLs is the same mistake in new clothes.
Aug 1 · Google Search Central
Backlinko's 11.8M-result study and Ahrefs' 1M-keyword study both find a positive link between referring domains and rank, but the coefficient is weak.
Jul 31 · Backlinko
GPTZero, the Tow Center and a Cureus study each measured AI citation hallucination differently, and none of their numbers agree with each other.
Jul 30 · GPTZero
Two widely repeated hreflang error statistics do not trace to any real source. Here is what could be verified instead, from Google's own documentation.
Jul 29 · Google Search Central
Three 2026 studies measured what predicts citation by AI search engines. Position and relevance win; most citations skip brand domains entirely.
Jul 25 · arXiv, accepted to ACM SIGIR 2026
A common crawl-budget fix is backwards. Google's own documentation says noindex still costs a full request before the page gets dropped from the index.
Jul 23 · Google Search Central
Court testimony and a leaked Google document, read together, describe a click-based ranking system Google spent years declining to confirm in public.
Jul 21 · Search Engine Land
Google documents three required VideoObject properties, not the four often claimed, plus exact date and duration formats and a rich-result caveat.
Jul 21 · Google Search Central
CrUX data and a 20,000-URL ranking study both show a link between Core Web Vitals and rank, but Google's own docs put content relevance first.
Jul 19 · Google Search Central
A 2024 Vercel and MERJ study measured the real gap between crawl and render at scale. The median was seconds; the tail stretched to a full day.
Jul 17 · Vercel
SEO content repeats precise E-E-A-T ranking-weight percentages. We checked the two most-cited figures against their sources and Google's own documentation.
Jul 15 · Google Search Central
Ahrefs' December 2025 study puts the word count to AI Overview citation correlation at 0.04. Backlinko's 11.8M-result study finds no ranking edge either.
Jul 15 · Ahrefs
Google publishes a real, maintained list of the named systems behind Search ranking. Read directly, not summarized secondhand.
Jul 14 · Google Search Central
A specific local ranking percentage breakdown circulates widely. It doesn't match Whitespark's real 2026 chart, and Google names no percentages at all.
Jul 13 · Google Business Profile Help
x-default has been explained by Google at least three times since 2013. Here is the real, dated wording each time, and what current documentation says.
Jul 6 · Google Search Central
Google called HTTPS a very lightweight ranking signal in 2014 and has never revised that number. Adoption data now shows why it barely needs to.
Jul 3 · Google Search Central
Featured snippet prevalence and CTR figures vary by nearly 2x across sources. Here is which trace to a real, dated study, and which don't trace anywhere.
Jun 25 · Ahrefs
Google's own Article structured data documentation names zero required properties, only recommended ones, which changes how schema work gets prioritized.
Jun 22 · Google Search Central
Show more 
