Ahrefs is a late entry to SEO’s Game of Acquisitions, but their deal with longtime industry favorite Glen Allsopp (aka Viperchill) shows that they are not playing around.
Glen announced the acquisition at the end of last week via X:
I’ve been friendly with Glen ever since I (a nobody with no audience) managed to convince him (a saint) to do episode one of my long-dead podcast circa 2013, and have bought every product he released over the years, from Backlinks.xxx to his SEO Blueprint course.
The acquisition includes:
- Detailed.com (and large email list, presumably)
- The Detailed chrome extension (450k+ weekly users)
- The aforementioned SEO Blueprint course
- And Glen as an acquihire.
On that last point Glen wrote:
I’m also super excited to be joining the company to work on marketing and product.
[…] My focus now is on product and tool ideas, research reports, marketing insights and everything actionable we can share to help grow your business.
Bringing on someone like Glen, who has spent the last decade or two doing actual SEO work has me pretty excited to see what he brings to the Ahrefs product, ngl I’m looking forward to this.
The Big Picture for Ahrefs
As main Ahrefs competitor Semrush has spent the last several years consolidating some of the tastiest off-market properties in the SEO space under their control including Backlinko, Search Engine Journal, Martech.org, and Exploding Topics, among others, it began to feel like Ahrefs would never break from their “build, don’t buy” strategy. Maybe they were happy with their $100M ARR bootstrapped business (as of March ’23) and didn’t feel any pressure to dabble in owned media.
It’s not like they haven’t stepped up to the plate and tried to swing big with building assets in the past.
In 2022 they launched Yep.com, a search engine project using the infrastructure they already have in place for crawling the web, and which they invested $60M into. From everything I can find, the search market share of Yep is still fairly small.
On the one hand, I admire their focus on product. It has certainly paid off, as they’ve become one of the top two SEO tools used by industry professionals and marketing teams. You only have to look at the August 2025 Similar Web graph to see that:
On the other, it has been weird to watch Semrush excel with an owned media strategy, acquiring some of themost valuable brands and co-opting the voices of some of the industry’s most well-known figures.
I can’t help but wonder if this is a shift in Ahrefs’s media strategy, or a one-off where we don’t see them come up for air again until 2030 to acquire a second major SEO brand, or announce the launch of some even bigger initiative than, checks notes, a search engine.
My last thoughts on this acquisition:
It’s interesting to watch the slow corporate takeover of our industry. The loss of independent voices is going to have some impact on the industry–even if Glen is going to keep Detailed as a separate brand, it’s still going to carry Ahrefs’s point of view, just as Backlinko, under the guidance of the talented Leigh McKenzie carries the banner for Semrush.
I’ve also been keeping an eye on up-and-coming SEO tool Search Atlas and whether they will be stepping into the acquisition dance as well.
At the same time it’s like we’re also watching Majestic and Moz fade into obscurity, swallowed by the horizon as the industry sails off into the future without them.
