With almost $100m in ARR without taking VC money, Ahrefs is now challenging Google

Google is the most visited website in the world, and by a large margin too. It has more than 90% of the global search market, with its closest competitor, Microsoft’s Bing, having just 2.7% market share, according to a recent ABC News report.

On top of churning out relevant search results fast, Google also offers this service for free. But Ahrefs, a search engine optimization (SEO) service provider based out of Singapore, is looking to go up against the US-based tech giant with its own search engine.

The move might seem foolhardy to some – even the company’s founder and CEO, Dmitry Gerasimenko, tells Tech in Asia that he previously thought it would be unwise to compete with such a household name.

“A few years ago, I had this thought that Google was getting US$100 billion [back then] in ad revenue by building pages from someone’s content,” he says. “So I started thinking about how it could work better to make creating good content a well-paid job.”

Ahrefs CEO Dmitry Gerasimenko / Photo credit: Ahrefs

A search for alternatives

Ahrefs develops online SEO tools and other related services for marketers, product managers, and content writers, among others. The easiest way to describe what the firm does, Gerasimenko says, is that it helps people see what is happening on the internet.

Back in 2019, the chief executive announced that Ahrefs was working on a general purpose search engine.

“Imagine if [Google] suddenly implemented a 90/10 profit share model, sending US$90 billion per year to publishers who create content,” says Gerasimenko. That would help content creators make a better living by filling up search results alone, he adds.

This is exactly what Ahrefs aims to do with its search engine Fairsearch: give 90% of the profit it makes back to the content creators and websites that answer its search queries. For the founder, this is doable if the company manages to keep costs low. Search engines, he says, are also inherently a low-upkeep service.

But the verdict hasn’t been settled yet. In 2020, the UK competition authority in a report estimated that it would cost US$10 billion to US$30 billion to create a competitor to Google’s search engine.

However, Colin Hayhurst, the CEO of small UK-based search engine Mojeek, says in the ABC News report mentioned earlier that a better estimate for building such a search engine would be around A$200 million (US$155 million). His own search engine cost around A$6 million (about US$4.6 million) to build and has been able to index 3.7 million pages.

Hayhurst also notes that the cost of building a search engine has gone down due to a sharp fall in server costs. Today, it’s cheaper to index the internet than it was when Google launched its search engine, he shares, adding that Google has created a myth that it requires huge resources to compete with the company.

Ahrefs’ 90/10 profit sharing model would differentiate it from competitors such as Bing and Yahoo, which both failed to grab significant market share from Google, observes Gerasimenko. The two Google alternatives, he says, just offer the same features as the search engine giant but are less optimized.

When using Ahrefs’ search engine, users can expect their online privacy to be more intact. “We’ll remove personally identifying information before saving the logs. After we get a query, we remove the IP addresses and any other session identification,” the company said. The only data Fairsearch would be keeping is the country and language of the user, as its crucial information for the search engine to put out more relevant results.

No VC funding, no problem