About Tim,
Tim Soulo has been CMO at Ahrefs for 11 years and has never once defended his marketing budget to his CEO.
He tracks revenue, not attribution. He scores every piece of content by how likely it is to convert a reader into a customer. And as the search landscape shifts from Google to AI, he’s using Ahrefs’ own web crawler to catch misinformation before the models train on it.
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Here are the 6 things that stayed with us.
1. Attribution is a dead end for most B2B products
Ahrefs deals with buying cycles of 9 to 12 months. By the time someone signs up, tracking the original touchpoint is nearly impossible. Tim’s approach: watch revenue. If it’s growing, marketing is working. If it slows, go find out why. No dashboard required.
2. The business potential framework
Every piece of content Ahrefs creates gets scored from 0 to 3. A score of 3 means there is no way to solve the problem without Ahrefs. A score of 0 means the content doesn’t mention the product at all. Tim’s rule: cover every 3 before you touch a 0.
3. Events without ROI tracking
Ahrefs sponsored its first conference 7 years ago for pure branding. No badge scanning, no lead attribution. The logic was simple: they existed online but nowhere in the physical world. Today they sponsor more than 20 events a year, and Ahrefs Evolve covers 80% of its costs through ticket sales and sponsorships.
4. GEO runs on the same logic as SEO
The questions people type into ChatGPT mirror what they search on Google. Tim’s starting point: take your highest-traffic content, feed it to an LLM, and ask which prompts would lead someone there. Track directional trends across two or three AI systems. Stop chasing precise percentages — they shift every time you measure them.
5. SEO is already a GEO problem
A pricing mistake on the Ahrefs website quietly spread across the web. AI tools scraped those pages and amplified the wrong information. The fix Ahrefs built: use their own crawler to detect every new mention of the product the moment it goes live, analyze sentiment with AI, and reach out to fix errors before any model can train on them. Tim’s framing: your website is now written for two audiences simultaneously, humans and machines, and the machines are less forgiving.
6. Passion for the craft beats AI fluency
AI can generate ideas indefinitely. What it cannot do is tell you which ones are worth pursuing. Tim hires for people who read about marketing, talk to other practitioners, and build genuine taste over time. That judgment, he says, only comes from experience accumulated the hard way.
Find Tim on LinkedIn : https://www.linkedin.com/in/timsoulo/
Enjoy,
— Jordan
