Ahrefs, the company known for making SEO tools, is getting into the search engine game with Yep, a search engine focused on privacy and content creators.
Google is by far the most dominant search engine on the market, with Bing a distant second. Despite Google’s dominance, or perhaps because of it, alternative options are becoming increasingly popular. DuckDuckGo and Brave are two examples of search engines that protect user privacy, and Ahrefs’ Yep is about to be another.
According to TechCrunch, Ahrefs has invested $60 million of its own capital into developing Yep. What’s more, the company is building on its years of crawling the web for its SEO business. The company says its crawler can visit 8 billion web pages per 24 hours.
“Creators who make search results possible deserve to receive payments for their work. We saw how YouTube’s profit-sharing model made the whole video-making industry thrive. Splitting advertising profits 90/10 with content authors, we want to give a push towards treating talent fairly in the search industry,” said Ahrefs founder and CEO, Dmytro Gerasymenko. “We do save certain data on searches, but never in a personally identifiable way. For example, we will track how many times a word is searched for and the position of the link getting the most clicks. But we won’t create your profile for targeted advertising.”
If Ahrefs is able to deliver on its promise of privacy, combined with giving content creators the lion’s share of the profits, it may well have a winner on its hands in Yep.
In the meantime, users can try out Yep here.
