Ahrefs Podcast

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/

How do you triple revenue while cutting marketing spend by 90%? Ariel Rubin, VP of Content at Air, did exactly that — and won two Webbys along the way — without ever having a budget bigger than $100K per campaign.
Ariel breaks down the playbook behind Air's viral marketing: working with 86-year-old TV legend Maury Povich for "almost nothing," shooting a Webby-nominated video with a two-person crew for $2,500, and growing Air's Instagram from 6,000 to nearly 70,000 followers in seven months — all organic.
You'll learn why distribution — not the idea — is the real challenge, how Ariel runs a three-person content team that punches far above its weight, and why he refuses to offload creative thinking to AI. Tim and Ari also brainstorm a viral book trailer live on air, debate whether SaaS is becoming a commodity like water, and get into the real talk on backlash and controversy in brand marketing.
Timestamps:
(00:00) Intro
(00:48) Ariel's favorite Air campaign: the Maury Povich story
(02:57) Showing up bigger than you are
(04:35) Is a celebrity campaign actually cost-effective?
(06:10) Why distribution — not the idea — is the real challenge
(08:43) Short-form Instagram and events as distribution
(10:45) A tour of Air's wildest campaigns
(13:47) What's done in-house vs. with contractors
(16:30) Real campaign budgets: $2,500 to $67,000
(21:39) Why AI can't replace taste and creative ideation
(23:15) Live brainstorm: making a viral book ad
(28:50) Why real effort beats AI-generated video
(30:49) How Air integrates brand into top-of-funnel content
(39:56) Inside Air's three-person content team
(46:23) Liquid Death, SaaS as a commodity, and brand differentiation
(49:55) Backlash, controversy, and pulling the Bonnie Blue campaign
(56:15) Turning Air's office into a creative events hub
(58:25) Rapid fire: overrated trends, book recs, and brands to watch
Ariel Rubin: LinkedIn | X | Air
Tim Soulo: LinkedIn | X | Website
Referenced:
Air
Liquid Death
ClickUp
Uncanny Valley by Anna Wiener
The Middle Passage by James Hollis
Kareem Rahma / Subway Takes
Ahrefs
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Can a business book actually make you a million dollars? The surprising answer is yes — but almost none of that money comes from book sales.
Tim's book DISCOVERABLE is now available for pre-order → ahrefs.com/discoverable
Best-selling author Jeff Goins breaks down the real economics of publishing: why books are "a bad business model," how the back-end (courses, consulting, software, higher-converting leads) is where the money lives, and why one enterprise company saw higher contract values simply by mailing their CEO's book to every lead in their CRM.
Jeff is the author of The Art of Work and Real Artists Don't Starve, and runs a consulting firm that helps thought leaders turn big ideas into bestselling books. He was also Tim's personal mentor throughout the writing of DISCOVERABLE — Tim's first book, where he distills the marketing fundamentals behind Ahrefs' growth into a framework any brand can use to get found.
You'll learn how much a first-time author can realistically sell, what it costs to buy your way onto the NYT or WSJ bestseller lists, why most business books suck, and whether you should self-publish, go hybrid, or go traditional.
In this episode:
(00:00) Intro
(00:39) How much money can a first-time author actually make?
(02:51) How many copies do Jeff's clients really sell?
(06:52) The real reasons people write books (that aren't money)
(10:40) Why writing a book humbles you — and the pay-to-play tricks in publishing
(13:03) Proving a book's value: the CRM story and building real authority
(24:43) Client anecdotes: General McChrystal and the payoff of a book
(27:26) Where to start: the book proposal vs. the book plan
(36:43) Why the central idea of a book almost always changes mid-writing
(45:31) Jeff's best writing advice: brain dump, front-load, don't restart
(54:35) Why do most business books suck?
(1:00:04) Publishing options: traditional vs. hybrid vs. self-publishing

Pre-order DISCOVERABLE → ahrefs.com/discoverable
Where to find Jeff Goins:
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/jeffgoins
Website: goinswriter.com
Where to find Tim:
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/timsoulo
X: @timsoulo
Website: timsoulo.com
Referenced:
DISCOVERABLE — Tim Soulo (ahrefs.com/discoverable)
The Art of Work — Jeff Goins
Real Artists Don't Starve — Jeff Goins
On Character — General Stanley McChrystal
Atomic Habits — James Clear
The One Thing — Gary Keller & Jay Papasan
The 4-Hour Workweek — Tim Ferriss
Ryan Holiday — ryanholiday.net
Ahrefs — ahrefs.com

Want your brand to show up in ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini?
Here's the uncomfortable truth: LLMs don't crawl the web when they answer your questions. They search traditional indexes — ChatGPT leans on Bing, Gemini uses Google, and Claude appears to pull from Brave. So if you're not ranking in those indexes, you're not even in the consideration pool.
Dan Petrovic is one of the most respected (and delightfully nerdy) figures in SEO. He runs the Australian agency Dejan and was the top-rated speaker at Ahrefs Evolve in Singapore, where he presented research from asking Gemini one million questions to map how it ranks brands.
In this episode, Tim and Dan unpack what it actually takes to show up in AI search — from the mechanics of how LLMs select sources to the practical steps you can take today.
You'll learn the difference between grounding, citations, and mentions (and why a linked mention is the holy grail), why Reddit gets rejected over 90% of the time, why there's no such thing as "prompt volume," and how Dan uses on-page optimization in an agentic loop to make models "unable to resist" a client's page.
In this episode:
(00:00) Intro
(00:48) My brand doesn't show up in ChatGPT — what do I do?
(04:02) Two ways to get into AI answers: outreach vs. building your own pages
(07:11) Is LLMs.txt actually pointless?
(09:29) How ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude each use different search indexes
(10:42) Universal ranking factors: topical centrality, engagement, and popularity
(17:17) Practical example: what Ahrefs Podcast should actually do
(19:31) Should you optimize for every search engine, or just Google?
(22:59) How is AEO actually different from SEO?
(28:03) Can you influence LLM training data?
(33:58) Going nerdy: separating quality content from spam with Gzip compression
(37:27) On-page optimization in an agentic loop: making models "unable to resist"
(42:45) How often do LLMs ground their answers vs. answer from memory?
(47:37) Measuring AI visibility: entities, mention share, and citation share
(51:44) Why "prompt search volume" doesn't exist — and what to track instead
(56:35) How to generate prompts for tracking AI visibility
Where to find Dan Petrovic:
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/dejanseo
X: @dejanseo
Website: dejan.ai
Where to find Tim:
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/timsoulo
X: @timsoulo
Website: timsoulo.com
Referenced:
Dejan — dejan.ai
Brave Search — search.brave.com
Ahrefs — ahrefs.com