Employee #16 to $100M+ ARR: Tim Soulo on How Ahrefs Scaled Without Funding

Welcome to Market Movers: Building Brands & Links with Linkifi! Your go-to podcast for transforming your business into an unforgettable brand, where branding meets SEO and link-building. I’m Chris Panteli, Co-Founder and CEO of Linkifi, and I’m joined by my co-host and Co-Founder, Nick Biggs.

In this episode, we’re joined by Tim Soulo, CMO at Ahrefs, who joined the company as employee number 16 in 2015 and helped grow it beyond $100 million ARR without outside funding. Tim breaks down what AI search actually changes about SEO, why the fundamentals still matter, how Ahrefs approached AI visibility differently from the flood of new AEO tools, and why building a real brand still comes down to creating things people genuinely want to recommend.

 

Key Talking Points

✅ Joining Ahrefs as Employee Number 16. Tim was running his own WordPress projects and digital marketing blog when Ahrefs founder Dmitry noticed his work and invited him to lead marketing. In 2015, Tim moved from Ukraine to Singapore to join the company.

✅ AI Search Is Still Built on Search. Tim argues that beneath ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and other AI systems sits familiar web search infrastructure. AI may perform more searches and synthesize the results differently, but many traditional SEO fundamentals remain critical.

✅ Google Traffic Is Down, but It Is Far From Dead. Ahrefs data across roughly 70,000 websites shows Google’s share of website traffic has declined over the past couple of years, while paid and social traffic have increased. Tim does not expect Google search traffic to disappear.

✅ Why Ahrefs Took the Harder Route With AI Visibility. Rather than simply asking users to upload prompts and repeatedly checking them, Ahrefs built its own large index of millions of prompts across different AI platforms through Brand Radar.

✅ Simple Tracking Beats Overengineering. Tim believes straightforward prompts such as best noise-canceling headphones can provide a useful benchmark for AI visibility. Trying to model every personalized conversation creates complexity without necessarily producing more actionable data.

✅ The Problem With Custom Prompt Lists. Marketers can accidentally bias their own AI visibility reporting by tracking branded or overly favorable prompts. If the brand is already included in the question, its appearance in the answer tells you very little.

✅ Mentions Are Becoming the New Links. Traditional SEO depended heavily on links from other sites. For AI visibility, Tim sees a similar dynamic around brand mentions, recommendations and third-party validation, whether or not those mentions include a hyperlink.

✅ YouTube Stands Out as an AI Visibility Signal. One finding Tim remembers particularly clearly from Ahrefs’ research is the correlation between YouTube mentions and AI visibility, giving brands a strong reason to invest in video.

✅ Brand Building Was Always the Real Game. Speaking at conferences, appearing on podcasts, publishing content, earning awards and developing an industry reputation have always increased authority. Search engines and AI systems are simply getting better at recognizing those signals.

✅ AI Search Favors Companies That Actually Build Reputation. A company that only publishes SEO content may struggle against a competitor that also appears in the media, speaks at events, publishes on social platforms and becomes genuinely recognized within its industry.

✅ Tim Is Unsure Whether Vibe Coding Will Replace SaaS. AI makes it easier than ever to create small internal applications, but Tim questions whether most people actually want to maintain their own software rather than pay specialists to build and support a polished product.

✅ The Future Is Still Uncertain. Rather than claiming to know exactly where AI, software and search are heading, Tim says the next couple of years will reveal which behaviors stick and which new business models actually make sense.

 

Notable Quotes & Moments

📌 “A lot of the things are changing, but at the same time all the fundamentals stay the same.”

📌 “Long story short, it’s all good old SEO, essentially.”

📌 “Simple tracking is the most useful, the most straightforward and the most bulletproof.”

📌 “They don’t necessarily need to link to you, but they need to talk about you.”

📌 “You create a cool thing that people would want to talk about and recommend.”

📌 “This is not old-school marketing. This is forever marketing.”

📌 “It took us 11 years to get to where we are right now.”

📌 “I can tell you what I’m afraid of. I’m afraid of changes.”

 

About Tim Soulo

Tim Soulo is the CMO of Ahrefs, where he joined as employee number 16 in 2015 after building his own WordPress projects and digital marketing blog.

Since then, Tim has become one of the company’s most visible representatives while helping Ahrefs grow beyond $100 million in annual recurring revenue without outside funding. His work spans marketing strategy, SEO education, product positioning, content, brand building and, increasingly, the evolving world of AI search.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/timsoulo/ 

 

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