On the record
A few 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.
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Business Wire · Ahrefs press release ·
Ahrefs Launches Custom AI Prompt Tracking for Brand Visibility
The most recent thing we've said about ourselves, in our own corporate voice: “Ahrefs is a bootstrapped, profitable marketing software company with over $100 million in annual recurring revenue, operating with a lean team in a crowded market. Without external funding, the company has continued to invest steadily in new capabilities.” Sixteen years in; the thesis still fits in three sentences.
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Search Engine Journal · Coverage of Ahrefs research ·
Ahrefs Data Shows Brand Mentions Boost AI Search Rankings
SEJ's writeup of a finding from the Ahrefs Podcast: brand mentions on third-party sites correlate strongly with being cited across AI-search surfaces — both training-data-backed answers and live-retrieval ones. Tim Soulo's framing: “You just need to see where your competitors are mentioned, where you are mentioned, where your industry is mentioned.” Off-page SEO didn't die; it changed shape. Independent corroboration: AirOps' 2026 State of AI Search report landed on the same shape from a different angle — 85% of brand mentions in AI-generated answers come from third-party pages, not the brand's own site. Off-page SEO didn't die; the surface it lives on changed.
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Backlinko · Brian Dean's 2026 head-to-head ·
Ahrefs vs Semrush: Which SEO Tool Should You Use in 2026?
Brian Dean's side-by-side of the two industry leaders. The line that captures what we've been building toward for years: “Perhaps Ahrefs' biggest advantage is that it has an always-on feature that crawls sites every minute.” A 2026 verdict from one of SEO's most-cited independent voices — not our copy, not our deck.
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Siege Media · Ross Hudgens in conversation with Tim Soulo ·
Inside Ahrefs' $100M Growth: Tim Soulo on SEO, Content, and Social
A long unscripted conversation with our CMO on how we actually built the marketing org — SEO vs. diversification, the role of technical SEO, why we lean into LinkedIn and YouTube for thought leadership, and how backlink trends are reshaping the SEO industry. The title is also the receipt: a third-party host, not our team, framing the run as “$100M growth.”
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Newssky · Long-form interview with Daria Samokish ·
Ukrainians from Ahrefs launched the Yep search engine — they invested $60M
The most candid interview I've done on the actual engineering and economics of building an independent index: $60M+ in self-funded infrastructure, what was then a 13-year-old index competing with Google's 26 and Bing's 14, and why minimal-cost engineering matters when you're not Microsoft. (Four years on, the math has shifted in our favor: Microsoft retired the Bing Search APIs in August 2025, leaving Yep as one of a very small number of independent, full-web indexes you can still hit with an API call.)
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Search Engine Journal · Interview ·
Ahrefs CEO Answers SEO Questions About 'Yep' In Exclusive Interview
A deep dive into why Yep exists, how the algorithm works, and what a 90/10 revenue split would actually mean for the web.
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TechRadar Pro · Feature ·
Reinventing Google: the underdog search engine with a daring new vision for the web
“Creators who make search results possible deserve to receive payments for their work.”
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TechRadar · News ·
SEO giant Ahrefs is launching its own search engine
On launching the first data center hub and the plan to compete on principle, not scale.
The thesis hasn't changed; the venue has. For where Ahrefs and Yep have taken these ideas in the AI-search era, see what I'm building now →.