How Ahrefs got its users
They rank on SEO by doing SEO, with free tools as the entry point. Proof by demonstration is their best argument.
Confirmed. The team said it publicly, or the signals leave no room for doubt.
Reproducible, but it will cost you real money, real months, or a skill you may not have.
The edge you do not have: Their proprietary backlink index powers the free tools that act as the hook
- Authority that transfers to the product
- Backlinks that arrive without outreach
- Proprietary data, otherwise you write what an AI summarizes better
- Two years of consistency before the return
Editorial SEO in 2026
The channel most damaged by AI answers. It still works if you bring data or an opinion, not a summary.
Everything on this channel →The play
4 steps, in the order they ran them.
- 1
Only write on queries where your product is the natural answer
- 2
Ship free tools on tasks adjacent to your product
- 3
Use your own data to publish studies nobody else can copy
- 4
Turn every article into a product demonstration
The product itself
read from ahrefs.com, live“Make your business discoverable, in search, AI, and beyond”
Run this against your own product
Carries the play above, and is written to tell you no when this channel is out of reach for you.
The same twelve channels as an agent skill. It reads your repository and eliminates what you cannot run. Open source, MIT.
curl -o ~/.claude/skills/howtodistribute/SKILL.md https://howtodistribute.com/skill.md
How big it got
Category reference, grown without venture funding
What else they ran
The evidence1 checkable
They ran the same play
Want this verdict on your product?
Describe it. You get back the channel I would run in your place, the 30-day plan, and the number at which you stop.