It’s been four months since I joined Ahrefs, and in that time I’ve watched the team post dozens of product reviews. 85 to be honest.
Although I have been Ahrefs the customer for more than a decade, I have not seen how often new features are added to the platform.
Now that I (proudly) work at the company after Ahrefs acquired Detailed, one of my jobs is to track reviews and see if I can offer suggestions for improvement, or ideas on how Ahrefs customers can get more out of it.
Since I’m overseeing so many changes, maybe it’s time to share some of my favorites.
I was not asked to write this. I just know there is a lot of overlap between detailed readers and Ahrefs customers, so I hope to introduce you to something you missed.
It wasn’t easy to pick just ten so I cheated slowly in putting together a few related updates, but not too many.
1. Find backlink opportunities and filter competition levels by page type and Category
Ahrefs has earned its reputation, in part, by having the best backlink index on the web. That backlink data is always made more accessible.
Page types and categories now appear automatically in Backlink reports and SERP overviews, and can be used as filters:
Now it is incredibly easy to see all the podcasts mentioned by the site, or all the times they have been included in the “Best of” list posts.
If you haven’t already, you may find him mentioned in those same sources.
Filtering by category means you can find the most relevant (and least relevant) links that your competitors have taken. The former can be a good place to start for any relationship building efforts.
2. Keyword research is going global, making it much easier to identify popular words in other languages
Ahrefs Keyword Explorer has always shown traffic opportunities for non-English words, but it has never been easy to focus (or exclude) on any particular language.
That changed recently with the introduction of language filters, which allow you to separate the keyword suggestions for table tennis (English) and tennis de table (French).
Football is my sport the most…
This makes Ahrefs even more valuable to your content team that is already writing for different markets, or to help with international expansion plans.
3. AI visibility tracking with customized notifications is here
The past 18 months have seen the launch of dozens of AI visualization platforms, many of which have raised millions in funding.
Ahrefs has launched Brand Radar for the first time to help you track visibility across hundreds of millions of queries.
While Brand Radar has been a huge success – and Ahrefs’ fastest growing product – we’ve heard a lot of feedback from people who would like to track their goals, from time to time.
Custom tracking allows daily, weekly, or monthly monitoring of responses in ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Microsoft Copilot.
With the Brand Radar program all referrals already get access to 2,500 monthly checks, but for just $50/m you can get an additional 2,500 checks on top of that.
To put the numbers in perspective, if you were only monitoring ChatGPT responses in the US, you would be able to analyze 620 instant responses every single week.
If you wanted daily monitoring, you could track up to 80 notifications. More than enough to get an idea of what answers you are showing.
4. Monitor what’s being talked about on YouTube, Reddit, and TikTok with Brand Radar’s new indicators
Have you ever wondered how to track your product mentions on YouTube, at scale?
Or what if the things people are saying about you on Reddit, before they need to click on the search results, are positive?
With our three new indexes on Brand Radar, available to all Ahrefs clients (even without a separate Brand Radar program), you can now find that information.
Of course, one of the first things I had to go and check was what people were talking about in the detailed SEO Extension:
I’m biased, but I like that the results include a time stamp of whatever is said so you can experience the context for yourself.
5. Find out who is getting more links from your top competitors because of the previous backlink setup
In the Ahrefs ‘Backlinks Report’ in Site Explorer, there are 27 different filters you can use to help analyze the link status of your competitor’s sites.
Many Ahrefs customers have modified these filters to best suit their needs, but it can be difficult to save them as bookmarks, or to adjust them manually every time you conduct a survey.
With presets, you can now save as many groups of custom filters as you like, for quick access at any time.
If you want to find out when all your competing food blogs are taking new links within the original recipes, you can save a preset for that:
Other angles you can pursue include:
- Only checks are tracked, content links from sites with a minimum DR value of 30
- Only checking links from domains with at least 10,000 monthly visitors
- Quickly see all sponsored links pointing to the site.
No matter where you work, just click on the appropriate settings for your work.
6. AI question answers have been redesigned to better highlight brand mentions and quotes
Our AI response data consistently showed that your or your competitor’s brands were mentioned in the responses, but it wasn’t as easy to analyze as it could have been.
Thanks to some good work done by the front team, it is very easy to see the words mentioned, the quotes, and the structure of the answers.
The team also started using favicons to highlight who’s featured – a small touch, sure, but it makes quickly scanning through results a lot easier.
7. View your top performing folders in Google Search Console with the Site Structure report
One of my favorite reports in Ahrefs Site Explorer is the ability to see the top performing folders on any site.
You can find this under the ‘Site Layout’ menu item, and use it to drill down to the specific domains below:
For any sites where you sync Google Search Console data with Ahrefs, you can now get the same structure using your actual click data, like this:
Google Search Console is a great tool, but it’s great to take its functionality to the next level with Ahrefs integration.
8. The new ‘Patches’ functionality allows you to fix many website problems without touching any code
In early 2025, Ahrefs launched Patches, a code-free solution that allows anyone to easily edit title tags and meta descriptions on their websites from the Ahrefs dashboard.
The latest patches have some great new additions, allowing you to:
- Change the canonical URLs of any page
- Add a new redirect (or update an existing one)
- Add or remove noindex tags
- Update internal links throughout your site
Some of these features will require Cloudflare, which is the most popular CDN in the world with about 70% market share.
Others, like updating internal links, simply require JavaScript snippets embedded on your site.
9. Our Social Media Manager tool has been launched, and is free for all accounts
Although Ahrefs is primarily known as an SEO platform, it offers additional functionality to help with other aspects of marketing, such as website analytics, paid search insights, and tools to help with content creation.
The new Social Media Manager tool lets you post to all the leading platforms, including LinkedIn, Instagram, iX, and Facebook, all in one place.
Write a post once and have it published quickly to multiple accounts, or schedule it for a convenient time.
AI suggestions help you adjust your messages as you write, and new updates include being able to see all previous post statistics – even if you didn’t publish that post within Ahrefs.
10. Easily analyze traffic up and down by business and Purpose
On any site, you can now see the most common entities they’re picking up search traffic from, and visualize traffic by purpose (such as Information, Location and Brand).
For each business, you can see the raw traffic numbers and how many ranks are doing that.
For objective charts, just hover over any part of the graph, and you can see them broken down by numbers.
If a site has experienced significant traffic fluctuations, you can quickly see if the overall site has risen (or fallen) in Google’s rankings, or if certain queries have had a significant impact.
Much more is on the way in 2026 (including a personal review of my work at Ahrefs)
As I said in the introduction, I wasn’t asked to write this, but I felt like I should share some of what I’ve been focusing on over the past few months.
I’ve always been very open minded about what I’m working on, and that’s changed dramatically since I joined Ahrefs.
The support I’ve received since making the announcement has been amazing, and while I like to think I’m giving back a lot, I’m also learning a ton in the process.
I’ll write a full review with all the details I’ve had since making the career change, but it’s fair to say I’m pretty happy with how things are going.
One of my favorite perks is seeing all the upcoming features ahead of time.
If the above is part of what happened in the four months since I joined, you can be sure there are big things planned for 2026.
Finally, if you’re on LinkedIn, I’m more active there than ever, and I’d love to connect.
I also share ideas and things I’m working on on X and Facebook.
