Not too long ago, a LinkedIn submit claimed that you may exchange paid website positioning instruments with only a handful of ChatGPT prompts and save $8,400 yearly.
The submit exploded. 500+ likes, 400+ feedback, and persons are loving it.
However SEOs didn’t.
I can’t imagine we’re nonetheless speaking about this on the finish of 2025. I need to imagine it’s ragebait. However whether or not he’s antagonising on function, right here’s the reality: ChatGPT doesn’t, and may’t, do website positioning. It will probably solely speak about it.
It will probably sound like an skilled, drop the appropriate phrases, and even generate a plausible desk of “low-competition, high-intent” key phrases with CPC and search quantity.
However these numbers are fully fictional. They’ll’t see the information that powers website positioning. They’ll solely approximate it.
In the event you’re okay with this, then that’s completely tremendous.
What’s not okay is believing the numbers generated by ChatGPT to be true and different folks telling you you possibly can merely belief what ChatGPT is producing.
To grasp why the poster is incorrect, you must have a look at how LLMs truly work.
LLMs are skilled on huge datasets of written language, studying patterns about how phrases usually comply with one another. All they do is predict textual content.
ChatGPT isn’t pulling information from a dwell search index or a key phrase database. In reality, there’s a “exhausting cease” when their coaching information ends. For instance, GPT-5’s cut-off was September 2024.
LLMs can’t monitor how rankings shift, how search volumes fluctuate, or how backlinks develop over time both.
Once they offer you a key phrase with “1,200 month-to-month searches” or an issue rating of “43,” these aren’t metrics. They’re merely guesses. The mannequin has no actual visibility into Google’s index or essential website positioning information.
As my buddy Matti Ljungberg says, “After all it could possibly “estimate month-to-month search quantity”. Identical to I can estimate there are 47 million penguins residing in your fridge. Pure guesswork, but it surely sounds convincing!”
Alternatively, at Ahrefs, we acquire, course of, and retailer massive quantities of essential search information. We have now the second most energetic net crawler on this planet and we crawl and re-crawl trillions of pages, always updating these pages and their backlinks in our index.
We even have billions of key phrases (28 billion, to be precise) in our key phrase database.
We use all of those information to calculate metrics that matter to SEOs: Area Ranking, search quantity, natural search site visitors, key phrase problem, backlink profile, search tendencies, and extra.
So whereas ChatGPT can describe website positioning completely, it could possibly’t carry out it. You continue to want website positioning information to do good evaluation.
The excellent news: the issue isn’t with AI. It’s the disconnect between LLMs and website positioning information.
So, when you can join ChatGPT and different LLMs to dwell website positioning information, you may get actionable website positioning insights as when you have been speaking to a buddy.
Guess what? You’ll be able to. As a result of that’s precisely what the Ahrefs MCP (Mannequin Context Protocol) does.
In easy phrases, the Ahrefs MCP is a bridge, a normal that permits AI assistants like ChatGPT or Claude to attach on to Ahrefs’ information. As an alternative of counting on their coaching information, your favourite AI assistant can now make dwell API calls to Ahrefs and pull in actual key phrase metrics, backlinks, and web site efficiency information.
Now, as a substitute of utilizing a immediate like this and having ChatGPT hallucinate key phrase information for you…
You’ll be able to join your Ahrefs account with ChatGPT or Claude, then use this immediate:
Inform me concerning the rankings [Competitor] has on the primary web page of Google that [My Site] doesn’t have first-page rankings for.
To find content material gaps between your web site and your rivals.
Cool proper? In reality, when you join Ahrefs with the AI assistant of your alternative, the poster’s prompts now do make sense. Since you’re now not asking ChatGPT to hallucinate. You’re asking it to name Ahrefs’ database and return actual metrics from our dwell database.
Need extra use instances on easy methods to use our MCP with AI assistants? Try this submit on the 15 finest use instances from website positioning legend Glen Allsopp.
Closing ideas
To place merely: The prompts didn’t fail as a result of they have been dangerous. They failed as a result of they have been blind. However with our MCP, they will now ‘see’.
That stated, even with entry to actual information, AI isn’t all of a sudden an website positioning strategist. It nonetheless wants a human who is aware of what to do with it.
The MCP doesn’t exchange your judgment, your workflow, or your expertise. It simply removes the busywork between perception and motion. As an alternative of switching between filters, exports, and dashboards, you possibly can simply ask your query and get the information you belief, quicker.
AI doesn’t exchange website positioning. Quite the opposite, it helps you scale.
