How vibe coding helps Ahrefs optimize for GEO

I sit down and interview Tim Soulo, the CMO of Ahrefs, about their website and how it’s part of their powerful growth engine

Recently, I chatted with Tim Soulo, the CMO of Ahrefs, to learn how they approach their website and what is working for them.

Below is a Q&A with Tim.

Ahrefs is known for having an expansive list of “free tools” on your website. How do you approach building these tools, and what kind of impact do they have?

A couple of years ago, we quickly developed a set of free AI-powered writing tools that we added to our main site. This is highly replicable now thanks to things like Lovable, Cursor, Google AI Studio, etc, because they’re not ultra complicated.

We continue to add/develop these, but it’s always with a vibe-coded MVP version first, which is definitely something other businesses can copy.

Since we introduced them, they’ve driven over 76 million visits to the site and nearly 20K signups.

Obviously, the traffic and signups are the real victories here, but this is still useful advice for anyone looking for site optimizations for GEO.

For GEO purposes, launching quick, free tools (and having them curated somewhere on the site) can help shape brand narrative, especially for those trying to get a foothold in a market OR those who are pivoting to something new.

Vibe coding free tools can also be a good way to test interest. It gets more eyeballs to our non-content core offering.

When the LLMs are crawling your site, they see that part of your product offering now includes xyz. Offering these tools for free increases the chances they’ll be mentioned or recommended by other happy users on social media or other websites, which in turn will reinforce to LLMs that your business model now includes xyz and is more diversified than what it was previously.

In today’s landscape, there is a lot of pressure to push AI-messaging across the site. How does Ahrefs approach AI positioning? Any wins in conversions or lift from certain AI positioning/messaging?

Last year, there was a huge craze among startups and tech companies to explicitly mention on their websites that they use AI, that they’re “AI-native,” and to make all sorts of bold claims. What we noticed is that pretty much every player in our space — whether martech, SEO tools, or tech in general — was rolling out this kind of messaging regardless of how deeply their product actually adopted AI. Because at this point, everyone understands that “using AI in your product” can be as simple as hooking up an API from OpenAI, Anthropic, or another major LLM provider. But that alone doesn’t make your product any more special than every other product that can hook up the same API and do the exact same things. So the claim that “our product uses AI” has essentially zero value these days. How sophisticated that application of AI actually is — that’s another question entirely.

Personally, I’m a big fan of the phrase “underpromise and overdeliver.” So during the past year, while the AI craze was happening — and it’s still happening — we didn’t make any outrageously bold claims about AI in our product. At the same time, we couldn’t ignore the fact that people, companies, and marketing leaders want to know that the tools they’re using are cutting-edge and forward-looking. So we did integrate AI into our messaging as well.

I can tell you that Brand Radar, our AI visibility product, is our fastest-growing product ever — it crossed $10 million in annual recurring revenue in about four to five months since launch. People clearly want quality AI products.

Are there any sections on the site you have adjusted or modified within the last 12 months that are performing particularly well?

The product marketing team has a simple goal: make sure our website has ample information about our product. Whenever we release a new product or feature, we want it properly reflected on our website — both as a dedicated landing page and within our blog articles, since we have a lot of content addressing the problems people are trying to solve in their marketing, and we mention our tools there. So whenever we ship something new, we go back and update the relevant articles to include it, and we create landing pages as well.

For example, we recently launched an MCP Connector that lets you hook up Ahrefs to your AI assistant of choice, and we’re about to create a landing page for it. The interesting thing about these kinds of pages is that they’re almost a self-fulfilling prophecy. When people search for “Ahrefs MCP” and find nothing because we haven’t created any content about it, they just give up and search for something else. So the search volume stays low precisely because people aren’t finding what they’re looking for. But as soon as we create the page, people who search for it actually find it, start using it, implement it, and most likely talk about it to their peers. If they have an audience, they mention it to their following, which drives even more people to search for it. It creates a loop: people search, find, use, talk, and generate more searches. The traffic and performance of the page grow over time.

This isn’t just a theory. We saw this exact dynamic play out with our Looker Studio connectors. The search volume for “Ahrefs Looker Studio connectors” was super low, but as soon as we released the product, created a landing page, and promoted it, the search volume started growing month over month, and more and more people visited that page. So our goal is simply to ensure our website contains comprehensive information about our product, so that whenever people search for something, they find it, start using it, and tell their friends.

Ahrefs has one of the largest footers in SaaS. Is there any special thought or strategy to such an extensive footer?

That footer is there primarily for SEO purposes. Going back to my MCP Connector example — once we release it, it will definitely be added to our footer, because there needs to be a way for Google to discover the page, for it to rank, and for AI systems to find it. There also needs to be a way for visitors to our website to discover it.

But why not just cram everything into the top menu? Because we want to respect people’s attention. We don’t want to overwhelm them — the more options you show visitors, the less likely they are to take action on anything. So we keep our top navigation clean and minimalistic, focused only on the most important things. If someone scrolls all the way to the bottom of our website, they’re probably looking for something specific — and there they’ll find a comprehensive index of the most important parts of our product and company, making it easy to explore whatever they’re interested in.

You can think of it as a sitemap for humans. There’s the traditional sitemap we create for Google and search engines so they can discover important parts of your website even if those parts aren’t well represented in your navigation. Our footer serves a similar purpose, but for people. Of course, it also carries SEO value by providing strong internal linking to the pages we want performing well in search engines. So it works double duty: a useful navigation tool for visitors and an SEO asset for discoverability.