Ahrefs Content Explorer 2.0: key features and use cases

Executive overview

Content Explorer 2.0 is a searchable database of over a billion pages with social and SEO metrics for every page. New features make it faster to research trends, find broken link building targets, and identify skyscraper opportunities — all from a single tool.

A single tool can replace several manual prospecting workflows if you know the right filter combinations.

Trends charts

• Enter any topic or brand name to see published vs. republished page counts over time.
• Light blue bars = newly published; dark blue = republished.
• Filter by "published once" or "republished" to isolate view.
• Use site:competitor.com to analyse a competitor's post frequency and update cadence.
• Spikes in brand mentions can reveal PR or link-building campaigns worth reverse-engineering.

Broken link building by topic

• Search a topic keyword within titles (e.g. "how" + "jobs") to surface informational content.
• Enable the broken pages filter to show results returning 404, 410, or no-domain errors.
• Set a minimum of 20 referring domains to filter for pages worth targeting.
• Add the Trends filter (past 3 years) to the results table to eyeball whether a page once had traffic.
• Organic traffic history signals link quality — pages that ranked once likely have solid backlinks.
• Click the Details button to see the traffic trend and pinpoint when the page went dead.

Outdated content for skyscraper link building

• Search your niche topic, then filter to "published once" to exclude updated pages.
• Set a custom publish date range (e.g. 2010–2016) to target genuinely old content.
• Set a minimum of 50 referring domains to ensure the page has meaningful link equity.
• Add the Trends filter to the table to quickly spot pages whose traffic is fading.
• Fading traffic on old content with many backlinks = strong skyscraper candidate.

Workflow and efficiency features

• Click a domain in the results to instantly filter by that site — useful when one domain dominates results.
• Combine low referring-domain and high organic-traffic filters to find low-competition topics from trusted sites.
• Click an author's name to see all their published articles across the web.
• Apply "one page per domain" to see every site that author has written for — useful for hiring or guest post outreach.