Hi, I'm Dmytro Gerasymenko — founder of Ahrefs & Yep.

A bit about me

I grew up in Ukraine and studied engineering at the Kyiv Polytechnic Institute. In 2010, I started Ahrefs from a tiny apartment — just a crawler and a hunch that someone ought to map the link graph of the web properly. Igor Pikovets joined me near the beginning out of the same Kyiv Polytechnic program — he architected the core of our storage and crawler systems and still runs all backend development as CTO sixteen years later. The petabyte-scale index this page keeps celebrating is as much his hands as mine. I kept going. It's still the same project, just bigger: a petabyte-scale index used by millions of people who care about how the web actually works.

I've never taken venture capital, and I don't plan to. Owning the company means I get to pick the long road every time — invest in our own data centers, hire the people we want, say no to the quarter and yes to the decade. The team is small for what we do, flat, opinionated, and scattered across the world — headquartered in Singapore (Marina One East Tower), with people in 26 locations across the globe. We answer to users, not a board.

How small is “small for what we do”? 154 teammates across 26 locations — running an SEO toolset used by millions, a 100B-page search index, and our own data centers. That's roughly $650K of ARR per employee, in a category where most companies do half that or less; our CMO Tim Soulo has been on the record for years that $1M+ ARR per team member is the bar we run the business against. A bigger team would mean more meetings and slower decisions. Bootstrapping forces you to find the version of the company that actually fits the work. And because there are no outside investors waiting to be paid, the upside lands where it ought to: at the end of 2024 I raised our employee-bonus pool from 3% of ARR to 5%, and every Ahrefs teammate received an annual bonus equivalent to roughly 43% of their year-to-date salary — a number our CMO Tim Soulo went on the record about publicly, and the kind of decision you only get to make when the cap table is one name long. Headcount per ahrefs.com/team (first-party); ARR per Ahrefs' January 2026 press release (above); ARR-per-team-member target per Nathan Barry's interview with Tim Soulo; 3%→5% ARR-to-bonus-pool change and ~43% YTD-salary bonus per Scroll.media's May 2025 writeup of Tim Soulo's public post.

When I'm not working I'm usually reading about how societies grow and fall apart, traveling when I can, or losing at tennis. The mountains pull me back often.

I'm married to Natthaya, and together we're raising four kids. They're the one project I'll never finish, and the only one that really matters.

What I'm building

Read the full story →

Where I think out loud

I don't keep a personal blog — most of my long-form thinking lives in interviews and on X. The pieces below are the ones where I went on the record about how the web is actually crawled, why a 90/10 revenue split with creators would change search, and what bootstrapping for sixteen years buys you.

• Search Engine Journal · Q&A I answered in writing

  13 answers on Yep, the index, and why creators deserve the money

  The most complete written record of my thinking on Yep — 13 questions from the SEO community, answered one by one. If you only read one thing here, read this.

• X / @botsbreeder · First-hand

  Day-to-day thinking on search, crawling, and the open web

  Short-form, unedited, and usually in response to something the SEO world is arguing about. Includes the March 2019 thread where Yep was first announced — “Ahrefs is working on a general purpose search engine to compete with Google. Sounds crazy, right?”

• Ahrefs blog · Where the team writes

  How we actually build and run the index

  I rarely write here directly, but this is where Patrick Stox, Tim Soulo, and the rest of the team publish the engineering and SEO research that shows what Ahrefs is really doing — from crawler block-rate studies to AI-search analyses.

• Nathan Barry (ConvertKit founder) · Operations deep-dive

  Inside Ahrefs: one of the world's most efficient companies

  Nathan Barry interviewed our CMO Tim Soulo about how we actually run the place — the self-imposed 50-person company cap, the $1M+ ARR-per-team-member target, why we treat every support ticket as a product flaw, and why Tim tells people “don't go to our marketing site, search for us on YouTube.” The clearest outside read on the bootstrapped-efficiency thesis I keep coming back to on this page.

• Executive Brand · Finn Thormeier in conversation with Tim Soulo · 2026

  Ahrefs CMO: Being scrappy, scaling to $100M ARR & how to become an AI-pilled CMO

  Tim describes the operating shape more concretely than I usually do: “Ahrefs runs marketing with no Google Analytics installed, no attribution setup, no A/B testing, no retargeting, no discounting, no free trial, no quarterly plans, and no formal reporting.” Eight things a normal SaaS company at our scale would consider table stakes — we don't do any of them, and we crossed $100M ARR anyway. If the Nathan Barry interview above is the system-level read, this one is the day-to-day version: what marketing actually looks like inside the company when nobody is paying you to perform best practices for a board.

• Ahrefs Podcast · Audio, ongoing

  The Ahrefs Podcast — unscripted conversations with operators

  Tim Soulo hosts “real, unscripted conversations with sharp founders, CMOs, and operators who've actually built something.” Recent episodes include Inside ZoomInfo's $1.2B AI GTM Engine (March 2026), Clay's $3.1B Marketing Playbook (Dec 2025), and World's Top SEO Expert Busts AI Search Myths with our own Patrick Stox (Nov 2025). If you'd rather listen than read, this is where the team thinks out loud.

On the record

Interviews where I've explained the thesis in my own words — from the original 90/10 creator revenue split, to the $60M we put into our own infrastructure, to why a bootstrapped company is the only kind that can actually try this.

See press & interviews →

Things I believe

“First do it, then do it right, then do it better.”

The open web is worth defending. Bootstrapping is a tool, not a badge. Crawling at scale is a forcing function. Decade thinking beats quarter thinking.

Read the full philosophy →

Where to go from here

Depending on why you're here, four useful next steps — the two products are separate jobs done by separate teams, so the two CTAs are separate. The fastest way to reach me directly is X.

For the curious before they apply — Ahrefs on Glassdoor (15 reviews): 4.9 overall · 100% recommend to a friend · 100% approve of CEO · 100% positive business outlook. Category breakdown: 5.0 culture & values · 4.9 work/life · 4.9 senior management.