Ahrefs’ New Search Engine Pays Creators for Quality Content

Content creators can now earn through a new search engine. Taking a different route from Google, Ahrefs seeks to empower publishers, websites and digital creators through the content they produce.

Ahrefs CEO Dmytro Gerasymenko unveiled his future plans for this alternative search engine that he believes can compete with Google.

In the series of tweets posted in 2019 and 2021, Gerasymenko shared that Ahrefs will be prioritizing payment to creators from their ad revenue through the 90/10 model. This means that creators receive 90 percent of the search engine’s profit.

Ahrefs is working on general purpose search engine to compete with Google. Sounds crazy, right?
But lets talk about two huge problems with Google which they will never want to fix:
— Dmytro Gerasymenko 🇺🇦 (@botsbreeder) March 27, 2019

Ahrefs is getting closer to publicly promoting the Web Search Engine we are working on. In case you missed the previous announcement – the point of our search engine is to share ad revenue with content creators 90/10. With 90% going to creators. pic.twitter.com/VExspO7y0v
— Dmytro Gerasymenko 🇺🇦 (@botsbreeder) June 18, 2021

What sets Ahrefs apart from Google’s search engine is its focus on quality content and an opportunity to value authenticity instead of listing websites or pages based purely on rankings. He also criticized the format page of Google’s search results where content from websites and web pages are summarized.

The new search engine will encourage people to visit websites of the content creators, thereby giving the latter more opportunities to get monetized through their platforms.

Citing Wikipedia’s call for donations for their articles, Gerasymenko emphasized the importance of a profit-sharing model where they will pay content creators so they will no longer have to display paywalls on their websites.

Gerasymenko also stated that this new search engine will not hinder the user’s privacy.

UPDATE: On June 4, 2022, Gerasymenko announced the new search engine called Yep.com that will share 90% of advertising profits with creators.

Officially out on @TechCrunch: Ahrefs builds https://t.co/wisITUtwU9, a private search engine that will share 90% of advertising profits.https://t.co/2KcJpL3dBt
— Dmytro Gerasymenko 🇺🇦 (@botsbreeder) June 4, 2022

Ahrefs is originally a software that generates SEO for Google rankings.