Things I believe

“First do it, then do it right, then do it better.” Ahrefs motto · ahrefs.com/about

The open web is worth defending. Most of what's good on the internet — the blogs, the forums, the small sites, the weird corners — exists because nobody asked permission to publish them. Search engines were supposed to make that web findable. Somewhere along the way the deal got worse for the people doing the writing. Fixing that is most of why I show up.

How bad has the deal gotten? In a February 2026 study of 300,000 keywords, our team found that Google AI Overviews now “keep” 58% of clicks that used to go to the ranking page — up from 34.5% in our April 2025 baseline. Independent research lands in the same neighborhood: Seer Interactive measured 49–65% CTR losses, Authoritas measured 47.5%. And Cloudflare's CEO has said the scrape-to-visitor ratio collapsed from 1:6 to 1:15 in six months — the per-AI-lab numbers underneath that aggregate are sharper still. Cloudflare's own crawl-to-refer ratio data for the first seven months of 2025 shows Anthropic crawled ~38,000 pages for every 1 visit it sent back in July (down from 286,930:1 in January — an 86.7% improvement, still the worst imbalance among major AI players), OpenAI ran ~1,091:1, and Google ran ~5:1 — the search engine still gives roughly one referral per five crawls, the AI labs give one per thousand to one per forty thousand. And per Business Insider's January 2026 readout of the latest Cloudflare data, both Anthropic and OpenAI's ratios worsened again between September 2025 and January 2026 — the improvement reversed. Cloudflare's own framing: by mid-2025, training drives nearly 80% of AI crawling — the bots are taking the open web's raw material to teach the models, not to send anyone back to read the pages. And it isn't a niche event: in a separate analysis of 146 million SERPs our team published in November 2025, AI Overviews fired on 20.5% of all keywords (29.99M of 146.12M) — and on 57.9% of question-format queries and 46.4% of seven-word-plus queries, the exact long-tail informational searches the open web was built to answer. For every hundred clicks a page would historically earn at the top of the SERP, fifty-eight are now consumed by a summary the publisher didn't write and isn't paid for — across one in five queries overall, and one in two of the questions people actually ask. That's the deal the open web is up against — and the reason a fairer search ecosystem matters more in 2026, not less. Primary: Ahrefs blog, “AI Overviews Reduce Clicks by 58%” (Feb 2026, 300K-keyword study, December 2025 data vs. December 2023 baseline). Prevalence numbers from Ahrefs blog, “What Triggers AI Overviews? 86 Factors and 146 Million SERPs Analyzed” (Nov 2025). Independent corroboration and Cloudflare CEO 1:6 → 1:15 quote via PPC.land's Feb 2026 writeup. Per-AI-lab crawl-to-refer ratios and “80% of AI crawling is training” framing from Cloudflare's own blog post on crawlers, clicks, and AI bots (first-party, with Jan–July 2025 monthly tables); Sept 2025 → Jan 2026 worsening per Alistair Barr, “Anthropic and OpenAI are crawling the web even more and not giving much back”, Business Insider, Jan 12 2026.

Bootstrapping isn't a badge, it's a tool. No outside money means no quarterly pressure, no board, no exit calendar. It also means we get to do unreasonable things — own our own data centers, build a search API for AI on our own index, refuse to ship the obvious cynical version of a product. That optionality compounds.

A concrete example: at the end of 2024, every Ahrefs employee got an annual bonus equal to ~43% of their year-to-date salary — funded by lifting the share of ARR that goes to the bonus pool from 3% to 5%. That's the kind of decision a board doesn't let you make. Source: Scroll.media, May 2025, citing Ahrefs CMO Tim Soulo.

Crawling at scale is a forcing function. Indexing the web honestly — fresh, broad, polite to publishers — turns out to be one of those rare engineering problems where you can't fake your way through. Either the index is good or it isn't. I like work that doesn't let you bluff.

Receipts: AhrefsBot is the #1 most active SEO crawler on the internet, and the 2nd most active web crawler overall — behind only Google (per Cloudflare Radar), visiting over 8 billion pages every 24 hours and updating the index every 15–30 minutes. Underneath that headline tempo, the operational pulse is more specific: 10 million genuinely new pages discovered every 24 hours and 300 million pages re-crawled and re-scored every 24 hours — in our own first-party numbers from the Content Explorer landing page, currently. That's roughly 116 net-new URLs per second and 3,472 re-evaluations per second, sustained, every day. The infrastructure underneath it is the kind of thing you can only afford if you own it: 3,100 servers, 654,700 CPU cores, 503 petabytes of SSD, all ours, no cloud bill. And yet, in a May 2025 study of ~140 million websites by our team, AhrefsBot was also the least-blocked of the three major SEO crawlers (6.31% of sites disallow us, vs. 6.49% for Majestic and 6.34% for Semrush). On the top 1M sites by Domain Rating, only 0.97% explicitly block us. Most active and least blocked at the same time — “polite to publishers” isn't a vibe; it's a number you can audit. Crawler ranking, server, CPU, and SSD figures per ahrefs.com/enterprise (first-party, citing Cloudflare Radar); discovery and update tempo (10M new pages, 300M re-crawled per 24h) per ahrefs.com/content-explorer (first-party, live landing-page counters); block-rate study by Patrick Stox & Xibeijia Guan, “The SEO Bots That ~140 Million Websites Block the Most”, Ahrefs blog, May 2025.

The bot landscape changed under all of this in 2025–2026, and we're measuring that shift too. In our own May 2025 study, AI bots accounted for nearly 25% of all bot requests — a category that barely existed eighteen months earlier and now sits a quarter of the way to displacing search-engine bots as the dominant reader of the open web. So in 2026 we shipped Ahrefs Bot Analytics: a server-side, Cloudflare-integrated read on every bot hitting your site — 12+ categories including AI crawlers, AI assistants, and AI-search agents, isolatable with one toggle, no JavaScript, free during beta on every paid Ahrefs plan. The same instinct as Webmaster Tools in 2020: if a measurement matters to the open web, we'd rather give it away than gate it. ~25% AI-bot share figure per ahrefs.com/bot-analytics (first-party, citing Ahrefs' own May 2025 data); underlying study “Meet the New Web Crawlers: AI Bots Are Closing in on Search Engine Bots,” Ahrefs blog, June 18 2025; product details (12+ categories, AI-bot filter, Cloudflare integration, free during beta) per ahrefs.com/bot-analytics.

Decade thinking beats quarter thinking. Almost everything interesting Ahrefs has built took longer than it should have, and is better than it had to be. That's the trade I'll keep making.

A quieter receipt: Ahrefs now starts at a $29/month Starter plan — well below the long-standing $99+ entry that defined our pricing for years. A board-run SaaS chasing ARPU rarely opens the door that wide. We did it because the kind of builders who'll matter in ten years can't all afford $129 today. It's the same instinct that produced the “$7 for 7 days” trial I built years ago, after our open free trial turned into “huge abuse of our service” — paid friction beats abuse, and a founder gets to ship that the same week he decides on it. And the door we open widest doesn't cost anything: in 2026 we renamed Ahrefs Webmaster Tools to Ahrefs Free and broadened it — in our own words on that page, “we moved beyond ‘Webmaster Tools’ to reflect modern teams and give broader free access to Ahrefs’ tools.” What used to be one verified-site tool is now three: Web Analytics (a privacy-friendly, cookie-free GA alternative, free up to 1M events/month), Site Audit (170+ technical and on-page checks), and Site Explorer (the real backlink data and the real keywords your pages rank for) — all scoped to domains you can prove are yours, no credit card, no trial clock. The same index that powers the $1,499 Enterprise plan, narrowed to your own properties, given away. That's the version of “open door” a $100M+ ARR bootstrapped shop can afford to ship and a board-run one usually can't. Source: ahrefs.com/pricing; pricing tier reviewed in Ubersuggest vs Ahrefs (2026); “$7 for 7 days” origin per Exploding Topics, citing Ahrefs CMO Tim Soulo on free-trial abuse; ahrefs.com/webmaster-tools (first-party), corroborated by RightBlogger's 2026 free-AI-SEO-tools roundup (“the free version of Ahrefs scoped to your own verified domain … real Ahrefs data”).

If you want the shortest version of all of this, it's the line we've had taped to the wall at Ahrefs for years: “First do it, then do it right, then do it better.” Ship the honest version, sharpen it, then keep sharpening. Nothing about that needs a board's permission. Ahrefs' company motto, published on ahrefs.com/about.