Let’s get right into it.
Content gap tool revamp
Meet our latest core tool: Competitive Analysis. This is where you’ll find the new and improved Content gap tool.
Content gap 2.0 shows you keywords that your competitors rank for but you don’t, which can reveal gaps in your content coverage and strategy.
For example, to find blog ideas that our competitors are covering that we have yet to write about, I’d enter the Ahrefs blog URL along with a few competitors and hit the Compare button. Content gap will show me the keywords that at least one of our competitors ranks for in the top 10, but where our blog doesn’t in the top 100.
While this was also doable in the old Content gap tool, we’ve added some new features and filters to make the new Content gap lots more flexible and actionable. I’ll highlight three things today.
Firstly, we’ve added a new heatmap. It’s right at the top of the new Content Gap – it shows us the number of keywords our blog has in common with our competitors. The darker the color, the more keywords we have in common.
Secondly, in the old Content Gap, there was no way to set position filters. But now you can.
Let’s say that we wanted to zoom in on blog topics that with some effort, could rank in the top 10. We can set the filters to show both the keywords where our blog ranks in positions 11 - 20, as well as where at least 1 of our competitors ranks in the top 10.
Or, let’s say we want to improve the relevancy of keywords. We can set the filters to show keywords where the target is not ranking, plus that specify 2 or more specific competitors must rank in the top 10.
Finally, in the old Content Gap, you couldn’t filter out certain SERP features. This led to image pack positions giving undesired results for some people. But now, you can use this “Main positions only” toggle to filter out positions in SERP features like image packs and top stories.
This is the first version of Content gap 2.0, with more updates coming soon.
Available on: All new Standard plans and above. We haven’t removed the old Content gap report for now, so legacy Lite plans can still use it.
Overview 2.0 additions
You’ll see a new Domain Rating history chart in both the General and Backlink profile views in Overview 2.0. In the Performance chart, toggle the Domain Rating metric on to track your target’s DR over time.
Another addition to Overview 2.0 is the Crawled pages widget. It shows the number of unique pages crawled over the last 6 months and how it’s changed over the last 30 days, along with a breakdown by HTTP status code below the chart.
Search volume estimates update [July]
We’ve updated our search volume estimates in Keywords Explorer. Before, misspellings of groups of keywords with the same search volumes were causing spikes in organic traffic.
We now detect more keyword clusters and have adjusted the search volume of keywords belonging to the same cluster. With this update, you should notice a spike in keywords, but a smaller spike in organic traffic.
Search volume sparklines
All keyword ideas reports in Keywords Explorer now feature sparklines that show changes in search volume over the past 12 months. This should give you a great overview of search volume trends at a glance.
Inspect button in URL context menu
We’ve added an Inspect button in the URL context menu. Just click on the caret next to a URL in any Ahrefs report and hit Inspect to look at its source code and page text, or compare changes between dates.
We’ve also started hiding HTML snapshots for pages crawled by AhrefsBot if they’re marked with the noarchive tag.
Updated SERP overview table
The SERP overview table in Rank Tracker now matches the data source we’re using in Site Explorer and Keywords Explorer. Metrics should be more accurate and also better aligned with the other tools.
Other updates:
- Words column replaced Ahrefs Rank for a more unified list of metrics
- Non-200 HTTP status codes are now shown for search results
- All ranking positions within the project’s scope are now highlighted, not just the top one.
Filters on Content Explorer landing page
We’ve added all primary filters to the landing page of Content Explorer. This means that you can now apply all the filters you’d like in your initial search.
Set user limits in bulk
From Account settings, you can now select multiple users and edit their credit usage limits in bulk. This helps you allocate credits more efficiently when additional ones are shared from the common workspace pool.
New AI-powered writing tools
We’ve released a bunch of free AI-powered writing tools which will get your writing off to a fantastic start. Each tool specializes in a single task, from paraphrasing any chunk of text to generating meta descriptions for your pages. They all use ChatGPT’s API.
APIv3 for Enterprise endpoints
We’ve released endpoints for the remaining Keyword ideas reports, Related terms and Search suggestions.
Read API documentation for:
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That’s all for this month. If you have any feature requests, you can leave them on our Canny or in our subscribers-only Ahrefs Insider community. Enjoy!
