Glen Allsopp 👾

I have some big personal news: Detailed has been acquired by Ahrefs. 🎉

I'm also super excited to be joining the company to work on marketing and product.

A few months ago Tim Soulo invited me to speak at their upcoming conference in San Diego, Ahrefs Evolve.

I brought up an idea I hinted at on the Ahrefs podcast last year, and 24 hours later we were on a call about me potentially joining the company.

If you follow me you'll know I'm obsessed with all things strategy and research in this space - and more importantly, doing the work - so to get to do that on a much bigger scale is genuinely a dream of mine.

The Detailed SEO Extension and all current features will remain free.

In five years it has grown to 450,000+ weekly users, which I'm incredibly grateful for. We'll add new features at some point, while keeping in place what's already there.

Detailed will remain a separate brand and I'll continue to personally update relevant projects there.

My focus now is on product and tool ideas, research reports, marketing insights and everything actionable we can share to help grow your business.

Finally, a HUGE thanks to everyone who has read and shared my work over the years for this to even be a possibility. 🙏

I'm really excited for what's next.

500+ tweets later, a huge thank you for all of the great feedback.

I've tried to read every single one, and replied to lots of messages.

Most of what I saw was very positive, though I completely understand not everyone will love their new score.

I have lots to gather and share with the team, and I also see opportunities for us to talk more about some aspects of the change

Look out for more there.

Thanks again! 🙏

Today, we (Ahrefs) are releasing a preview of DR4: a new Domain Rating model for scoring backlink profiles.

Your own DR may change, so we're sharing two ways you can check before it rolls out on December 1st.

The two main changes:

1. Subdomains now have their own rating, so our help desk (DR 75) is scored differently than our root domain (DR 92)

2. The pool of domains impacting DR has essentially halved, to ~132M.

In our testing, DR4's correlation with Google rankings across all hosts is more than 2.5x stronger than our current model.

We've been analyzing the data for weeks and have already had some great outside feedback, but I'm sure there will be more.

That's why I'm opening up a direct feedback form for a short period of time.

I'll go through all of the comments myself and pass on what I see with the rest of the team.

We're pretty excited about finally sharing this with more people. 🙏

Link in the first reply

Even though Fiverr's CEO just said SEO is "going away", he gave my favorite earnings call so far this quarter.

"I think that brand loyalty is changing. And yes, it is a very high risk because agents don't care and they don't have brand loyalty."

"So you need to optimize for things that they do care about. I'm not going to go into the details for obvious reasons, but it's uncharted territory, much like doing SEO 20-something years ago was uncharted."

"Think about Microsoft and their dominance in enterprise software. Now, if they put a lot of emphasis on Copilot as a channel for customers, and Copilot can actually deliver the output, then it's going to be harder to sell enterprise software"

If those quotes are interesting to you, I think you'll enjoy the full transcript, which should be easy to find.

Not because he has all of the answers, but AI is clearly something he thinks about a ton, so it's pretty thought-provoking and generally rare to hear from a CEO.

As always, I've attached my (very) simplified summaries of what companies have said so far.

They're short takes from much longer conversations, so please do your own research before making investment or marketing decisions.

I love diving into these, so hopefully you find them useful 🙌

Here’s a prompt I love for finding the most-linked-to content across dozens of sites at once.

(Not to copy anyone, but to get inspiration for your own efforts.)

"For these 20 [finance] sites, pull live crawled pages tagged as ‘Research’. Remove anything that isn’t an article, then use Batch Analysis to rank them by referring domains."

You can provide the sites yourself, or ask ChatGPT/Claude/etc. to pull organic competitors via the Ahrefs API.

For some sites, opinion pieces pick up the most links.

In industries with a lot of SaaS companies, you'll see a ton of original tools and research.

Check content sites in the beauty or fashion space, and you'll likely learn more about the research they report on rather than create.

Start small to make sure you're happy with the results.

On our cheapest plan with API/MCP access (Lite), you could check ~30K URLs this way if you only pull back referring domains, which could be hundreds of sites depending on how much they cover that specific page type.

Of course, not all links are created equal, so you can play around with different filters.

AI is then really good at finding commonalities, excluding topics you've already covered, and highlighting anything you might have unique insights on.

As I say, the goal isn’t to copy anyone, but to get inspiration on ways you can make something great.

Hopefully this is useful. Please let me know if you would like to see more of these 🙏