We’re sharing the content material that labored hardest for us in 2025, to provide you an thought of what may give you the results you want in 2026.
And, naturally, we needed to remind you of a few of our greatest blogs 😉
Under, we’ve used Ahrefs Net Analytics to seek out our most-viewed articles printed in 2025.
We had been impressed by Amanda Natividad’s SparkToro put up. Nice stuff from Amanda as regular—test it out for extra content material concepts!
In 2025, three of our 5 most-visited articles had been analysis research, created utilizing knowledge from Ahrefs.
The remaining two included an Website positioning weblog and an article generated virtually fully by AI.
Sidenote.
We’ve got filtered out blogs printed pre-2025, or these up to date in 2025.
Let’s get into it…
AI Overviews Cut back Clicks by 34.5% was our most-viewed article total, driving ~96,000 visits because it was printed again in April, in response to Ahrefs Net Analytics.
This analysis tapped into our first-party knowledge to deal with the query each Website positioning has been asking this yr: how a lot site visitors are AI Overviews truly stealing?
We analyzed 300,000 key phrases and located that when an AI Overview seems, the top-ranking web page sees 34.5% fewer clicks in comparison with related queries with out one.
By evaluating clickthrough charges earlier than and after Google’s AI Overview rollout, we measured the true affect: place #1 for informational key phrases dropped from a 0.056 CTR to simply 0.031 after AI Overviews appeared.
The info confirmed what many people suspected—AI Overviews are considerably decreasing site visitors to top-ranking pages, even when these pages nonetheless maintain the #1 spot.
An Evaluation of AI Overview Model Visibility Elements (75K Manufacturers Studied) got here in at quantity two. I wrote this piece of analysis to verify, as soon as and for all, whether or not PR and off-site model mentions had been a very powerful issue when it got here to AI visibility.
It was a concept I saved listening to in every single place on the time, however I (like others, it seems) needed to see the chilly arduous knowledge. Along with Ahrefs’ Knowledge Scientist, Xibeijia, I analyzed 75,000 manufacturers to evaluate how eleven completely different branded search components correlated with AI Overview visibility—we’ve since repeated this research for ChatGPT and AI Mode.
Our greatest discovering? Branded net mentions do correlate strongly (0.664) with AI Overview presence—extra so than another issue, together with backlinks or area score.
We additionally discovered that in case your model sits within the backside 50% of net mentions, you’re basically invisible to AI programs.
AI Content material Creation: My Course of for Excessive-High quality, Website positioning-Pleasant Articles was our third most-viewed weblog, racking up ~30K views.
My teammate Despina Gavoyannis created this sensible SOP (customary working process) for entrepreneurs eager to combine AI into their content material workflows.
This information walks by means of her actual course of for utilizing AI as a software—not a alternative—for creating content material that ranks.
The put up covers all the things from discovering rankable key phrases and figuring out search intent, to including authentic data that AI can’t generate on its personal.
Despina’s SOPs have carried out particularly nicely through Google Uncover site visitors…
Google Uncover customers appear to have interaction deeply with sensible, step-by-step SOPs that assist them full actual duties.
What Is llms.txt, and Ought to You Care About It?: Ryan wrote this explainer in simply a few hours utilizing ChatGPT. Now it’s our fourth most-viewed weblog of 2025.
Not unhealthy 😉
The put up breaks down llms.txt, a proposed customary designed to assist massive language fashions perceive and entry structured content material from web sites.
Whereas some builders are experimenting with it, no main LLM supplier at the moment helps it as a part of their crawler protocol.
Ryan’s take: It’s an answer in quest of an issue.
Search engines like google already crawl and perceive content material utilizing current infrastructure like robots.txt and sitemap.xml—LLMs use a lot of the identical setup.
In 2025, Ryan constructed a seven-part AI content material course of and has since created 6+ wholesale AI blogs, which, collectively, have pushed ~63,000 views to date.
You’ll be able to watch how he does it on the Ahrefs Podcast beneath.
It simply goes to point out that AI generated content material actually can carry out nicely. Use Ryan’s course of to deal with trending and rising subjects earlier than your rivals do.
Google Says “Hyperlinks Matter Much less”—We Checked out 1,000,000 SERPs to See if It’s True: Google has been telling SEOs that hyperlinks are much less essential than they was once, and plenty of within the business have accepted this as reality.
However is it truly true?
Patrick Stox, Ahrefs’ Technical Website positioning skilled, determined to settle the controversy with knowledge.
He analyzed the highest 1 million key phrases by search quantity, calculating Spearman correlations between SERP rankings and 20 completely different Website positioning metrics together with area score, backlinks, referring domains, and inner hyperlinks.
And, guess what? Hyperlinks nonetheless matter—lots.
Whereas the correlation dropped barely since an identical 2019 research (from 0.27 to 0.21 for whole backlinks), hyperlinks remained one of many strongest rating indicators, particularly for high-volume, aggressive queries.
The analysis additionally confirmed that hyperlinks matter much more for informational content material, native queries, and branded searches.
So whereas Google could also be hedging on the significance of hyperlinks publicly, the info tells a special story.
Equally to the SparkToro workforce, most of our prime content material in 2025 was research-based.
The truth is, 56% of our most-viewed posts (throughout each channel) had been analysis blogs.
Our prime 5 articles additionally tended to vary barely from supply to supply.
Listed here are our prime performers throughout natural search, AI search, direct, and social media.
Prime blogs by search site visitors
Prime blogs by AI site visitors
Prime blogs by direct site visitors
Prime blogs by social site visitors
Last ideas
Right here’s what we discovered from our prime blogs of 2025…
- Check claims individuals are skeptical about: When official narratives don’t match what individuals see IRL, data-driven analysis will get you consideration. That’s why Patrick’s analysis was so extensively seen—it supplied arduous knowledge that challenged Google’s narrative.
- Decide debates individuals care about: The perfect analysis solutions questions your viewers is actively debating, not ones you suppose they need to care about.
- Get in early on trending subjects: Many of those posts labored as a result of they jumped on trending subjects early. Some didn’t even have search demand after we began writing about them—we simply saved our ear to the bottom on social media and in communities, and wrote concerning the subjects driving dialogue. Then, over time, these subjects naturally gained search quantity. That’s why 4 of our prime 5 articles had been additionally our most-viewed articles in search.
- Don’t be afraid of AI-assisted content material: One in all our prime posts was whipped up in a day with ChatGPT, and nonetheless pulled in enormous quantities of site visitors. For well timed subjects or simple explainers, AI can get you 80% of the best way there—simply add your edits, pepper in some authentic examples, and ship it.
- Give individuals SOPs they’ll steal: Not all the things must be a knowledge research. Step-by-step processes individuals can truly observe and adapt for their very own work persistently carry out nicely.
- Use knowledge no person else has entry to: Three of our prime 5 posts used Ahrefs’ first-party knowledge to reply questions nobody else might. When you have proprietary knowledge or entry to data that different individuals don’t—use it. Whether or not that’s buyer surveys, inner gross sales metrics, help ticket tendencies, person conduct analytics, monetary knowledge, and even aggregated insights from consumer work—distinctive knowledge provides you a aggressive moat that’s unattainable to copy.
In terms of AI, the one certainty is uncertainty. What labored in 2025 may not work in 2026. However that’s precisely why we’ll preserve sharing what we study!
