Self-Promotion Content Works – Until It Backfires (AI SEO Experiment)

When self-promotional content worked

The clearest result came from Ahrefs Evolve, our new SEO & AEO conference.

Instead of just looking at overall brand mentions, I looked at places where a particular AI assistant didn’t mention the brand at all when answering a specific query during the period February 7-12.

After the first pages went live on February 13, Evolve filled 72 of those previously empty spots. Of the 72 new Evolve mentions in prompt engine slots that were empty before publication, 82% appeared in replies that quoted one of our pages.

This is the clearest evidence that the sites have made a difference. The brand went from “absent” to “present,” and four out of five times our site was the cited source.

The advertising for Ahrefs Brand Radar told the opposite story.

Ahrefs was already an established brand, so AI assistants named them in many relevant searches, with or without our help. When Ahrefs filled a previously empty space, only 6% of these new mentions came from replies that cited one of our pages. The other 94% came from third-party content.

Therefore, the self-promotion sites seemed to be much more important to the new brand than to the established one. For Ahrefs Evolve, content often acted as a bridge between “not mentioned” and “mentioned.” For Ahrefs Brand Radar, AI already had numerous other sources to draw on.

Copilot was the AI ​​assistant with the most mentions. Evolve went from nearly zero before launch to 39% of copilot responses in March, 57% in April and 65% in May. The twins have also gained weight, but less steadily. The perplexity barely budged. ChatGPT did not credit Evolve at all for this request.

And just to illustrate, here are some of the pages I created to promote Brand Radar and Ahrefs Evolve: