Ahrefs Content Changes: How to Use This New Ahrefs Feature

Ahrefs has been one of my favorite marketing tools and platforms for a long time, and one of the many reasons is that they're constantly looking for new features and tools to add, usually without an accompanying price hike. It's an ever-increasing value for the cost of an account, and given how much I use it, it's a steal.

One such feature is one they introduced a little over eight months ago, called Content Changes. It's a relatively narrow but very powerful tool for SEO and content marketing, and I've been getting a lot of recent use out of it. The thing is, it might not be entirely obvious how it works and how you should use it, so I wanted to talk about it.

So, what is Ahrefs Content Changes, what information does it give you, and how can you use it in your marketing? Read on for my breakdown.

What is Content Changes in Ahrefs?

First, let's just talk about what Content Changes is.

An oversimplified explanation would be a combination of Wayback Machine, DiffChecker, and Ahrefs' own traffic estimation tool.

It's a tool that lets you look at a URL and see:

• How the traffic and ranking of that URL has changed over time.
• How the actual content of the page has changed over time.

Ahrefs also tracks Google algorithm changes as another dimension of analysis and will chart all of this on a timeline.

This gives you a chart of traffic and ranking for a page over time, with markers for when Google made a change and markers for when the page's content changed. You can then see whether either of those changes impacted the traffic and ranking of the page positively or negatively.

Since Ahrefs is tracking content changes over time, they can also associate changed content with other reports. For example, when you scan a domain, they will show you the traffic of URLs on that page, the recent changes to that traffic, and any content changes to the page. They will categorize changes to the page as none, minor, moderate, or an overhaul.

Content Changes is a feature available by default in the Site Explorer in several places:

• As an added piece of data in the Performance chart in the Page Overview
• As a direct historical comparison tool in the Page Inspect menu
• As a link to the Page Inspect tool in the browser toolbar
• As an added piece of data in the Top Pages chart

It's available in all paid plans for Ahrefs, from Lite on up, so as long as you have a paid account, you're good to go.

Why Ahrefs Content Changes Information is Valuable

If you read the above and you thought "why is this important? I already know when I change my content and can see how it affects traffic and ranking," you're looking at it the wrong way.

Generally speaking, this isn't a tool you use in the analysis of your own site. You can, certainly, especially if you aren't keeping track of that information on a granular level yourself. But, it's most important for competitive research.

It allows you to answer questions like:

• Do your competitors go back and change their old content at all or regularly?
• When they make changes, do those changes improve their traffic?
• Do your competitors edit their content in response to Google algorithm updates, and does it help?

Remember how I mentioned that the tool is like a combination of Wayback Machine and DiffChecker?

For Wayback Machine, Ahrefs maintains lightweight historical versions of the pages in their index, so they have the raw text (if not the full HTML or full page with images) in their data center. Using both the archived version and the live version, you can then use the DiffChecker tool on the Page Inspect page to see the exact specific differences in text between the pages at any two dates. You can check changes before and after specific historic Google updates, changes over time, or any two records you want for a page, as long as Ahrefs has it.

How to Make Use of Ahrefs Content Changes Information

It's fine to talk about these kinds of things in abstract, but how can you actually get tangible, useful information out of a tool like this?

So far, there are four main ways I use it. If you have suggestions, feel free to let me know in the comments!

Check if your competitors update old content at all.

First up is an interesting piece of data on its own: are your competitors even updating their old content?

I've written a few pieces before on how often you should be updating old content, and how you can go about making those updates. I'm of the opinion that updating old content is a great way to keep your site fresh and valuable for users, and since Google loves sites that prioritize users, it's a good way to be in Google's good graces.

On the other hand, I've known site owners who spend all their time writing new content and never really do much with their old stuff. Either it worked, or it didn't, they feel. Effort spent on refurbishing old content is effort that could be spent on making new content, but new content has more of a chance than content that was proven poor already.

There's one significant reason why I like to check to see if competitors are updating their old content: opportunity.

If they aren't updating their old content, then that's an opportunity for you. Find their old content that might have some traffic or might have somewhat died down over the months or years, and see if you can cover the same topic, but better. You know they aren't updating it, so that's an opportunity for you to undercut and overtake them for those topics.

On the other hand, if they are updating old content, that's also an opportunity. It tells you two things. First, it tells you that if you try to undercut their best old posts, they'll very likely take action to fight back, and you might not win that battle. Second, it tells you what sorts of content they've targeted for updates, how often they update it, and what scale of updates they make, all of which can be useful information for guiding your own content updates.

Check if content updates are correlated with increased traffic.

A second thing you can check is how effective those content updates are. A site that frequently updates its content but only changes it in small ways that don't have much of an impact might not see any benefit from doing so. On the other hand, you might be able to see small changes that have large impacts.

One thing Ahrefs even mentions directly in their description of the Content Changes feature is being able to track when something as simple as inserting links in old content bumped it up, or where small changes helped, versus where a complete overhaul helped a post skyrocket. They were using their own site for a demonstration, but they used the tool so it has the same level of data you would likely have for a competitor.

I think the best insight you can get from this is to watch for changes that don't actually have much impact on the traffic and ranking for a piece of content versus ones that do. If you see that a competitor edited a piece of content to change a few keywords, and that had a significant impact, you know that you can edit similar keywords and see potentially similar results. On the other hand, if you see them edit content and all they do is remove some broken links or change a few sentences that don't have much impact, and that doesn't affect their traffic, you know you can keep those changes on the back burner for your own site.

Check if your competitors change content in response to Google updates.

I really like the ability to correlate the content change information with Google's update history right in the Ahrefs dashboard. It's data you can correlate yourself, of course, but it's very handy to have it in one place.

Seeing content changes and algorithm changes side by side gives you a lot of insight.

First, it tells you whether or not your competitors are affected by the algorithm changes right off the bat, both positively and negatively. That gives you a good baseline for what kinds of pages those changes are hitting and how.

Second, you can see if your competitors think they need to edit content in reaction to those updates. Typically, content changes in reaction to algorithm updates are going to roll in a few weeks or a couple of months after the update, though it depends on the competitor, their production schedule, and how reactive they are. This can also tell you whether or not they're paying attention at all, which not everyone is!

Third, you can see what effect those changes have if your competitors are making them. What did they think needed to be changed, and how did they change it? Most importantly, did they see improvements afterward? Were they right?

This is all information you can use to fuel your own reactions to Google algorithm updates, and even proactive changes to pages you worry are close enough to the line that they could be hit in the future.

Check if your competitors have adopted AI tools and how it's working for them.

This last one is a bit cheeky but could be handy. If you see pages being changed, you can evaluate those changes.

For example, if a bunch of pages are suddenly being updated with the addition of a range of related keywords, you could guess they're using something like Clearscope to recommend those changes. If you see larger passages being replaced or added in, you can check those using an AI checker and see if they're inserting AI-generated content or not.

This isn't directly and tangibly useful the same way the other data is, but it can be interesting to see if your competition is using AI for changes, and if so, if those changes work, and if those pages are hit with future algorithm updates.

Is Ahrefs Content Changes Data Reliable?

The last thing I wanted to touch on was the reliability of the data.

I've talked before about how accurate Ahrefs and other SEO tool traffic estimations are. The key takeaway is that Ahrefs traffic estimates are just that: estimates. They can only gather so much data, and while they're generally better than a lot of other tools, they still have limited access to that kind of data.

The other issue you might run into is a lack of historical data. If your competitors are small or if Ahrefs missed indexing certain changes, they might not have especially accurate data on when those changes were made, or they might not have a history at all.

Basically, the Content Changes tool is only as effective as the data it has, and it can never have fully complete data due to the nature of limited computational technology and indexation capacity.

That said, if Ahrefs has historical data about your competitors, it's generally Good Enough to do what you want and get the answers to the questions I posed above. You shouldn't compare their traffic estimates to traffic estimates from other sources, but if you compare Ahrefs data to Ahrefs data, you're golden. Just make sure if you want to compare it to your own site, you don't make the mistake of adding your Google Analytics data to the comparison.

I've been getting a lot of interesting insights out of the Content Changes data in Ahrefs, and I figured I'd mention it here so the rest of you can get similar info if you use Ahrefs. What do you think? Are there other useful insights I've missed? Let me know in the comments!