Ahrefs Podcast

“You never wanna be looking to sell. You wanna have a plan.”
Eugene Levin drove most of Semrush's ten acquisitions and was its President when Adobe bought it for $1.9 billion. Now he's building what he calls an applied-AI holding company to buy MarTech businesses, and he's the first person from Semrush to come on the Ahrefs Podcast. From the buyer's side, a business is worth what keeps running once the founder steps back. If you run a $3–10M ARR MarTech company and might sell one day, you'll learn what a buyer checks first and what lowers your price.
He shares:
Why Adobe bought Semrush, and who else it could have considered
Why a small, founder-run company is riskier to buy than a big one
How Semrush bought companies as capital allocation, from Ryte to Backlinko
The one deal that missed: a good business bought at 7x ARR in 2021
What he looks for now: $3–10M ARR, 10% growth or more, and why he asks for your billing data
Would a buyer still want your business if you weren't in it?
Connect with us:
Eugene Levin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eugeniylevin/
Tim Soulo: https://www.linkedin.com/in/timsoulo/
Ahrefs: https://ahrefs.com/
Chapters
00:00 Intro
01:32 Why Did Adobe Buy Semrush?
16:30 What to Look for in an Acquisition
33:04 What Earns a Higher Multiple
37:47 Criteria for Buying a Company
45:47 Bootstrapped vs. VC-Backed Sellers
50:54 Why a Portfolio, Not One Company
57:37 How to Structure a Founder Deal

“I don't think any SEO consultant should be charging a client less than $10,000 per month.”

Eli Schwartz, author of Product-Led SEO and a solo consultant for clients like Tinder, Coinbase and LinkedIn, joins Tim Soulo to talk about what SEO consulting pays, and why. His math for a $1M practice starts with a $10,000-a-month floor, and at the top of the range, he knows solo consultants earning more than $100,000 a month from a single client.

They're charging for value, not hours.

You'll come away knowing what to charge, how to land the clients who can pay it, and what to measure when the CEO asks what AI visibility is worth.

He shares:
How he quoted Blue Nile $10,000 a month, expecting a counter at $5,000, and made it his baseline
What a $10,000-a-month client can get, from content briefs to one expert hour (his own rate on Intro: $495 for 15 minutes)
Why personal brand and social proof win the big clients, and the podcast appearance that brought in G2 and WordPress
Why it took nine months of sign-offs to get "dating" into Tinder's homepage title tag, and about 12 hours to rank
Why prompts aren't keywords, and the business metrics he'd use instead
What's the most expensive problem you know how to solve?

Where to find Eli:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/schwartze/
X: @5le
Website: https://www.elischwartz.co/

Where to find Tim:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/timsoulo/
X: @timsoulo
Website: https://www.timsoulo.com/

Chapters
00:00 Intro
01:17 The $10K-a-Month Floor
06:40 What $10K a Month Buys
12:05 Earning Six Figures a Month
16:10 How to Land Big Clients
30:04 The Million-Dollar Question
38:14 Build a Business, Not a Podcast
43:28 Earn It or Buy It
51:26 Measure by Revenue, Not Prompts
56:13 The Future of AI Trackers

If you've ever wanted a side project but didn't know where to start, this episode is the build order.

The builder is Ryan Law, Ahrefs' Director of Content Marketing; the site is Conference Spotter (https://conferencespotter.com), a feed of upcoming UK marketing conferences; the tool is Letaido, Ahrefs' AI agent workspace; the bill was less than a day and about $500 in tokens.

He takes Tim Soulo through it one feature at a time: the first prompt (a list of events scraped from search queries), the brand-demand charts from Ahrefs keyword data, and the domain the agent bought.

You'll come away knowing which parts an agent now does for you, which parts still need your judgment, and why both people and Google reward a site that shows effort.

What took a team months, one marketer can now do in a weekend.

He shares:
Why Google doesn't like commodity content, and the brand-demand metric Ryan built from Ahrefs keyword data instead
Why the mascot exists: "big, bold, stupid colors" are a refreshing look against AI-generated websites
What the whole site cost in tokens, and why he agrees with Tim that a quality website shouldn't cost $10

Which of your ideas is still waiting on a developer?

Connect with us:
Ryan Law: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thinkingslow/
Conference Spotter: https://conferencespotter.com
Tim Soulo: https://www.linkedin.com/in/timsoulo/
Ahrefs: https://ahrefs.com/

Chapters
00:00 Intro
01:04 Vibe-coding a Side Hustle with Letaido
05:25 The First Build, Brainstorming with AI
15:04 Unique Data: Ahrefs Brand Demand + LinkedIn Momentum
23:02 Bold design Against AI-generated Tropes
29:15 Deploying: Time and Tokens Spent

If you work in marketing, part of what you make is what people believe before they try the product.

Nir Eyal, author of Hooked and Indistractable and a former lecturer at Stanford's Graduate School of Business, joins Tim Soulo to talk about his new book, Beyond Belief, written with Julie Li. He brings the research behind that idea: a wine that tasted better with a higher price tag, IBS patients who felt relief from pills they knew were placebos, and two identical cars rated at opposite ends of the chart.

When marketing makes people expect a better product, they don't just say it's better, they experience it, which is why Nir says marketing "is the product.”

He shares:
- Why Liquid Death fans say the water tastes better, and what that says about marketing
- The fMRI wine study and two identical cars from the NUMMI plant: the same product, experienced differently
- A study IBS patients felt relief from pills they knew were placebos
- Why venting about a family member or a coworker only reinforces the beliefs you already have about them
- Why telling everyone about a big, long-term goal can make things worse

What does your customer believe about your product before they've even tried it?

**Where to find Nir:**
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nireyal/
Website: https://www.nirandfar.com/

**Where to find Tim:**
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/timsoulo/
X: @timsoulo
Website: https://www.timsoulo.com/

Chapters:
00:00 Intro
00:56 Marketing and the Experience Loop
07:23 Beliefs vs. Fact
13:30 Planting Beliefs
27:50 The Four Questions
45:16 The Two Most Dangerous Words in English
53:02 Why Vision Boards Backfire
58:03 Announcing Your Goals

Searches for "AI search" are already running at nearly two-fifths the volume of "SEO" itself, and the industry is scrambling to keep up.

Tim Soulo sits down with Ahrefs content marketer Louise Linehan, who mined LinkedIn and Reddit discussion, and validated it against 18 months of Keywords Explorer data to surface the five AI search trends marketers are actually talking about:
- the race to prove AI's ROI
- optimizing for readers that are bots
- zero-click survival strategies
- the never-ending GEO-versus-SEO debate
- programmatic SEO's risky resurgence

When the clicks are vanishing and the industry can't agree on what replaces them, what's still worth optimizing for?

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Timestamps
(00:00) Intro
(01:00) The Method
(05:56) Trend 1: Proving the ROI of AI (and the New Reporting Wave)
(17:00) Trend 2: Agent Optimization: llms.txt, Markdown, Accessibility Trees
(23:30) Trend 3: Zero-Click Search and the Crocodile Mouth
(30:52) Trend 4: GEO vs SEO
(36:00) Trend 5: The Programmatic SEO Resurgence
(39:15) Rapid-Fire Predictions: Watermarks, Agentic Commerce, Negative GEO

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Where to find Louise:
Louise Linehan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/louise-linehan/

Where to find Tim:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/timsoulo/
X: @timsoulo
Website: https://www.timsoulo.com/