SEO
11 Internet Marketing Strategies That Work
Internet marketing can seem quite daunting and complicated. There are so many possibilities. But which strategies should you start with?
To help answer that, we’ve dissected internet marketing into its most basic strategies. We’ve also simplified them so you can get started right away.
In this article, we’ll cover 11 internet marketing strategies that work:
- Search engine optimization
- Content marketing
- PPC marketing
- Email marketing
- Affiliate marketing
- Influencer marketing
- Video marketing
- Social media marketing
- Podcasting
- Conversion rate optimization
- Reputation management
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of optimizing a website or webpage to increase the quantity and quality of its traffic from a search engine’s organic results. When your pages rank high on the search engines and maintain their positions, you can get almost free, passive traffic to your website consistently.

The amount of monthly organic traffic coming to Ahrefs.
How to do it
If you want to rank high on search engines, you have to target topics that your audience is searching for. Finding what these topics are is a process known as keyword research, and the easiest way to begin is to use a keyword research tool like Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer.
Here’s how:
- Go to Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer
- Enter one or a few terms relevant to your website or niche (e.g., if you sell coffee equipment, then you may want to enter keywords like coffee, french press, cappuccino, etc)
- Go to the Matching terms report


From here, you’ll want to look through the list and pick out relevant topics you wish to target. Generally speaking, the “ideal” keywords are those with high Traffic Potential (TP) and low Keyword Difficulty (KD).
You can use the filters to quickly narrow down such topics.


Then you’ll want to create a page that deserves to rank for that keyword. There are a few aspects to this process. But the most important part is to figure out why searchers are looking for that topic. This is known as search intent.
You can do this by looking at what’s currently ranking on the search engine results pages (SERPs) for your topic. For example, if we’re targeting the topic “best frying pans,” we’ll see that most of the top-ranking pages are blog posts about the best non-stick frying pans.


If we want to rank for this keyword, we’ll likely have to follow suit.
Once you’ve created and published that page, you’ll have to build links because they’re an important Google ranking factor. There are many ways to get backlinks, so I recommend reading our guide to link building.
Finally, you’ll want to make sure you get the technical aspects of your website right. (After all, if Google can’t find and index your pages, it can’t rank them on the SERPs.) The easiest way is to run an audit of your website with Ahrefs’ Site Audit. You can do this for free using Ahrefs Webmaster Tools.
Recommended reading: SEO: The Complete Guide for Beginners
Content marketing is the process of creating and distributing content to attract and retain customers.
How to do it
To get started, fill in the content strategy canvas. Your goal is to answer five simple questions:
- Who are you creating content for?
- Why are you creating content?
- What type of content will you create?
- Where will you publish the content?
- How will you create the content?


Completing the content strategy canvas should set you on the right path to creating content that will improve your business. However, don’t forget to promote your content too.
Promoting content means not waiting for your target audience to discover your content. Instead, it’s about actively putting the content in front of them. Follow the checklist in this post or this video to get more eyeballs on your content:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PoVYweKH4ck&ab_channel=Ahrefs
Recommended reading: Content Marketing: A Comprehensive Guide
Pay-per-click (PPC) marketing is a form of online advertising where advertisers pay a fee each time someone clicks their ad.
Search engine ads are the most common ad format in PPC marketing. Other formats include display ads on websites and social media ads, such as those you see on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube.
How to do it
You’ll first need to choose a platform you want to advertise on. You should only pay for ads on platforms where your audience exists. For example, if you’re selling enterprise software to C-level executives, you may not want to advertise on TikTok. (Of course, if you have data showing these execs in your industry are on TikTok often, then it makes sense to advertise there.)
After that, you should get familiar with the platform. Explore the ad platform by clicking around or take a course. These platforms typically offer educational resources to help you learn how to run ads (here’s one from Google).
Ads can succeed or fail based on your targeting, so make sure you have data to back up your targeting choices. For example, if you’re running search ads, you’ll need to do keyword research. You’ll need to know what people search for and then how much you’ll be paying for clicks on average.


You should also make sure you’ve set up your tracking properly.
Budget-wise, decide on a daily budget that won’t make a big dent in your overall marketing budget and start with that. Monitor and optimize your campaigns regularly. Once you start getting solid results, you can increase your budget.
Finally, creatives and copy matter too in PPC marketing. Make sure you’re constantly experimenting with different images, videos, headlines, body copies, and more to see what resonates with your audience!
Recommended reading: PPC Marketing: Beginner’s Guide to Pay-Per-Click Ads
Email marketing is any kind of marketing messaging done through the channel of email.
How to do it
Email marketing doesn’t just involve sending emails. It also includes:
- Building an email list.
- Designing, writing, and sending emails to the subscribers on your list.
- Segmenting the list.
- Deciding when to send the email.
- Monitoring the results.
- Curating the email list.
To begin, you’ll need a list of email addresses to send messages to. The easiest way to build this list is to offer an incentive to website visitors in return for subscribing. For example, e-commerce stores tend to offer discount coupons, such as what Frank Body does:


You’ll also need to decide what kind of emails you want to send to your subscribers. At the basic level, you should have a welcome email with the incentive you promised earlier. In Frank Body’s case, its first email features the 10% discount code.
But what should you send from that point onward? Unfortunately, there’s no clear-cut “right” answer. It’ll take a mix of intuition and experimentation to figure out what’s best.
For example, here’s an illustration of a potential email marketing workflow.
Even this sample workflow is pretty complex. There are many elements to get right. For us at Ahrefs, we keep things simple—we promise a weekly newsletter, and that’s all we send:


Recommended reading: The Ultimate Guide to Email Marketing
Affiliate marketing is where other people promote your products in return for a commission. For example, if your product costs $100, you can pay an affiliate $10 for each sale they generate for you.
How to do it
You’ll first need to create an affiliate program that people can sign up for. This gives them a unique link they can use to promote your product and track the sales they generate.
Then you’ll need to look for people who may want to promote your product.
The easiest way is to look for people who are already promoting competing products.
Here’s how:
- Go to Ahrefs’ Site Explorer
- Enter the domain of a competing product
- Go to the Backlinks report
- Look for an affiliate footprint in the URL
For example, many of the backlinks to bluehost.com go to URLs with /track/
in them:


These are most likely affiliate links, so we can find all the websites promoting this product by filtering for backlinks with this footprint (/track/) in the target URL and toggling “One link per domain”:
Recommended reading: How to Create a Successful Affiliate Program for Your Business
Influencers are people who have an active, sizable audience (usually on social media) and the ability to influence their audience to do something.
Influencer marketing is the practice of working with influencers to promote your brand’s messages, products, or services.
How to do it
The easiest way to find influencers is to use existing third-party tools. And there are different tools for the different social media platforms. Here’s a list to look through:
- Followerwonk (Twitter)
- Influenx (YouTube)
- Heepsy (Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Twitch)
- inBeat (TikTok, Instagram)
- Intellifluence (Reddit, SoundCloud, podcasts, Amazon reviews, iOS and Android reviews, Twitch, LinkedIn, Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, TikTok)
- Grin (Twitch, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, TikTok)
- Influence.co (Facebook, Pinterest, Snapchat, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, blogs)
- HypeAuditor (Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Twitter, Twitch)
When you’ve gathered a list of influencers, don’t reach out just yet. Since social platforms can be gameable, some of these influencers may have tons of fake followers. A certain percentage of fake followers is inevitable, but you don’t want them to be a significant percentage of those influencers’ following.
A quick way to check is to use a tool like SparkToro’s Fake Followers Audit (Twitter only) or HypeAuditor’s Instagram Audit.
Beyond the quantity of following, you’ll want to make sure the quality of engagement exists too. If an influencer has a lot of followers but barely gets any comments on their posts, it’s a potential red flag.
The absolute number of likes, comments, retweets, etc., doesn’t matter either. Quality does. Look out for genuine comments or conversations. If an influencer posts something and the comments look like these…
… then that’s a potential red flag.
Once you’ve narrowed down the list to those influencers with the amount of reach and resonance you want and made sure that the influencers’ image and reputation represent your brand well, reach out and ask to collaborate.
Recommended reading: Influencer Marketing: Definition, Examples, and Tactics
Video marketing is using videos to promote and educate your target audience. It’s also used to increase brand awareness and social engagement, allowing you to reach new and bigger audiences.
How to do it
To begin, you need to know what kind of videos you want to create. There are three main objectives for video marketing: brand awareness, education, or entertainment.
If your goal is to create videos for brand awareness or entertainment, then the good and bad news is there is no template. It all boils down to your creativity.
If your goal is to create educational content, then you can do keyword research to see what kind of topics or questions people are searching for on YouTube.
Here’s how:
- Go to Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer
- Switch the tab to YouTube
- Enter a relevant keyword or keywords
- Go to the Matching terms report
- Switch the tab to Questions
Once you’ve picked out the topics you want to target, create a video that’ll rank for them on YouTube. Watch this video to learn how:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NY3y0V9UDwM&ab_channel=Ahrefs
Recommended reading: The Simple (But Complete) Guide to Video Marketing
Social media marketing is the use of social media like Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn to market a company’s products or services.
How to do it
To begin, you’ll want to have a presence on major social platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn. Even if you’re not going to be active on those platforms, having a page or brand account offers legitimacy and also protects your brand account from potential squatters.
Social media is all about content. To build a following and gain engagement, you’ll need to post frequently. Understandably, being active on so many different social media platforms can be difficult if you are resource-stretched.
On a basic level, you should be active on the standard social networks: Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
So if you’re already creating content, you can always share those articles, videos, or podcasts on your social media pages. For example, all we do on our Facebook page is share our newly published content:
Furthermore, you can always repurpose content on social media. In fact, that’s what we do all the time.
For example, this tweet is an image from our article on doing a content audit:
Conducting a content audit in 2022? Use this flowchart to guide you 💥 pic.twitter.com/S2h45DiH1z
— Ahrefs (@ahrefs) April 19, 2022
If there’s a platform you want to invest further in, consider creating custom content for it. Watch how other brands and influencers craft their content, and you’ll get an idea of what works and what doesn’t.
Experimentation is the name of the game. Following tried-and-tested formats is a good idea, but don’t be afraid to try new things.
That was how Wendy’s did it, with a completely different tone, format, and identity compared to other brands at that time. (If you see brand accounts being funny or sarcastic today, you can credit it to Wendy’s.)
Podcasting is a type of content marketing that focuses on producing audible content. It is great for brand-building and growing an audience.
How to do it
There are two major strategies when it comes to podcasting:
- Start your own podcast
- Appear on someone else’s podcast
Starting a podcast is an entire topic on its own, so I’ll leave links to resources that you can consume:
At Ahrefs, we do have experience appearing on podcasts. In fact, our chief marketing officer, Tim Soulo, once set a goal to appear on 20 podcasts in a year and succeeded.
To appear on podcasts, you need a list of podcasts to be a guest on. Besides Googling for the top industry podcasts, one way to find them is to look for someone in your niche who’s already appearing on them.
Here’s how:
- Find someone notable in your niche who has been appearing on podcasts
- Enter their domain into Ahrefs’ Site Explorer
- Set the mode to Exact URL
- Go to the Backlinks report


Sift through the results for relevant podcasts in your niche. When you have a list, pitch to the shows.
Pitching is pretty straightforward. You either follow a show’s application process…


… or reach out by email and pitch yourself as a guest. First, find the email address. Then in your pitch, try to cover the three Ws:
- Who? Explain who you are, who you work for, etc
- Why? Explain why you’ll be a good podcast guest, i.e., sell yourself
- What? Explain what you want to talk about
Recommended reading: How to Use Podcasts for Link Building
A conversion is when a website visitor takes an action you want them to take on your website. So conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the process of optimizing your website or its pages to improve or encourage more of the actions you want visitors to take.
How to do it
Like SEO, CRO is not one and done. You can always optimize more. So rather than being one-off hacks you apply to your website, CRO is a systematic process informed by data.
As CRO expert Brian Massey puts it, CRO is “about meaningful tests backed by thorough conversion research and executed using a disciplined, step-by-step process.”
It involves understanding user psychology, user experience (UX) and user interface (UI) design, copywriting, persuasion, running A/B tests, statistics, understanding and analyzing data, and more.
Here’s a simplified example of what CRO may look like. Let’s say we want to improve the conversion rate of the Ahrefs Webmaster Tools page. That is, we want more people who visit the page to sign up for AWT.


To do that, we may want to systematically A/B test things like:
- The page design.
- The headline.
- The sub-headline.
- The call-to-action (CTA) button.
- Social proof (e.g., testimonials, case studies, etc.).
And more.
A note to bear in mind, though: For your A/B tests to be statistically significant (i.e., prove you can attribute any increase or decline to the change you made and that the change is not by chance), you’ll need a significant amount of traffic coming to your website.
So while CRO is important, it’s not something you do right from the get-go. Focus on using the other internet marketing strategies to drive more traffic to your website first before you even consider running split tests.
Recommended reading: Conversion Rate Optimization Guide by CXL
Online reputation management (ORM) is the practice of using digital marketing tactics and channels to help shape the public perception of a brand, an organization, or an individual online.
How to do it
Reputation management includes many different activities. For example, it may involve using social media to jump in on conversations and tackle negative or unhappy comments about your company.
Sorry for the inconvenience caused, Alan! And thanks for your patience. 🙏
— Ahrefs (@ahrefs) April 20, 2022
By acknowledging the source of unhappiness and listening to the customer, we were able to deflect anger and improve our relationship with him.
But it’s not just about social media. You can do reputation management in search engines too. For example, you may find articles ranking high on Google that speak negatively about your brand or perpetuate a misconception.
If it’s something you can correct, you should try to nip it in the bud.
Here’s how to find such articles:
- Go to Ahrefs’ Content Explorer
- Search for your brand name and exclude your own site [
-site:yourdomain.com
] - Set a Page traffic filter to something high (e.g., 1,000+ visits per month)


For example, we found a post by HubSpot about the best digital marketing tools. Even though it is a huge compliment about our toolset (thanks, HubSpot!), it mentions something inaccurate about our data:


Instead of “150 million keywords” in the U.S, we actually have 4.4 billion keywords. And instead of 150 countries, we have more than 200.


Plus, the screenshot of our UI it featured is outdated.
We’re proud of our data, and the ones mentioned by HubSpot are way off from our current state. And it may set up wrong or different expectations from users who discover us via this article.
In this case, we can reach out and ask HubSpot or the author to update these metrics.
Recommended reading: A 5-Step Online Reputation Management Guide (That ANYONE Can Follow)
Final thoughts
This list of internet marketing strategies is by no means exhaustive. But it should have educated you on some of the more popular and timeless ones.
When executed correctly, the strategies work and will continue to work.
Did I miss out on any important internet marketing strategies? Let me know on Twitter.
SEO
Mozilla VPN Security Risks Discovered

Mozilla published the results of a recent third-party security audit of its VPN services as part of it’s commitment to user privacy and security. The survey revealed security issues which were presented to Mozilla to be addressed with fixes to ensure user privacy and security.
Many search marketers use VPNs during the course of their business especially when using a Wi-Fi connection in order to protect sensitive data, so the trustworthiness of a VNP is essential.
Mozilla VPN
A Virtual Private Network (VPN), is a service that hides (encrypts) a user’s Internet traffic so that no third party (like an ISP) can snoop and see what sites a user is visiting.
VPNs also add a layer of security from malicious activities such as session hijacking which can give an attacker full access to the websites a user is visiting.
There is a high expectation from users that the VPN will protect their privacy when they are browsing on the Internet.
Mozilla thus employs the services of a third party to conduct a security audit to make sure their VPN is thoroughly locked down.
Security Risks Discovered
The audit revealed vulnerabilities of medium or higher severity, ranging from Denial of Service (DoS). risks to keychain access leaks (related to encryption) and the lack of access controls.
Cure53, the third party security firm, discovered and addressed several risks. Among the issues were potential VPN leaks to the vulnerability of a rogue extension that disabled the VPN.
The scope of the audit encompassed the following products:
- Mozilla VPN Qt6 App for macOS
- Mozilla VPN Qt6 App for Linux
- Mozilla VPN Qt6 App for Windows
- Mozilla VPN Qt6 App for iOS
- Mozilla VPN Qt6 App for Androi
These are the risks identified by the security audit:
- FVP-03-003: DoS via serialized intent
- FVP-03-008: Keychain access level leaks WG private key to iCloud
- VP-03-010: VPN leak via captive portal detection
- FVP-03-011: Lack of local TCP server access controls
- FVP-03-012: Rogue extension can disable VPN using mozillavpnnp (High)
The rogue extension issue was rated as high severity. Each risk was subsequently addressed by Mozilla.
Mozilla presented the results of the security audit as part of their commitment to transparency and to maintain the trust and security of their users. Conducting a third party security audit is a best practice for a VPN provider that helps assure that the VPN is trustworthy and reliable.
Read Mozilla’s announcement:
Mozilla VPN Security Audit 2023
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Meilun
SEO
Link Building Outreach for Noobs

Link outreach is the process of contacting other websites to ask for a backlink to your website.
For example, here’s an outreach email we sent as part of a broken link building campaign:
In this guide, you’ll learn how to get started with link outreach and how to get better results.
How to do link outreach
Link outreach is a four-step process:
1. Find prospects
No matter how amazing your email is, you won’t get responses if it’s not relevant to the person you’re contacting. This makes finding the right person to contact equally as important as crafting a great email.
Who to reach out to depends on your link building strategy. Here’s a table summarizing who you should find for the following link building tactics:
As a quick example, here’s how you would find sites likely to accept your guest posts:
- Go to Content Explorer
- Enter a related topic and change the dropdown to “In title”
- Filter for English results
- Filter for results with 500+ words
- Go to the “Websites” tab


This shows you the websites getting the most search traffic to content about your target topic.
From here, you’d want to look at the Authors column to prioritize sites with multiple authors, as this suggests that they may accept guest posts.


If you want to learn how to find prospects for different link building tactics, I recommend reading the resource below.
2. Find their contact details
Once you’ve curated a list of people to reach out to, you’ll need to find their contact information.
Typically, this is their email address. The easiest way to find this is to use an email lookup tool like Hunter.io. All you need to do is enter the first name, last name, and domain of your target prospect. Hunter will find their email for you:


To prevent tearing your hair from searching for hundreds of emails one-by-one, most email lookup tools allow you to upload a CSV list of names and domains. Hunter also has a Google Sheets add-on to make this even easier.


3. Send a personalized pitch
Knowing who to reach out to is half the battle won. The next ‘battle’ to win is actually getting the person to care.
Think about it. For someone to link to you, the following things need to happen:
- They must read your email
- They must be convinced to check out your content
- They must open the target page and complete all administrative tasks (log in to their CMS, find the link, etc.)
- They must link to you or swap out links
That’s a lot of steps. Most people don’t care enough to do this. That’s why there’s more to link outreach than just writing the perfect email (I’ll cover this in the next section).
For now, let’s look at how to craft an amazing email. To do that, you need to answer three questions:
- Why should they open your email? — The subject line needs to capture attention in a busy inbox.
- Why should they read your email? — The body needs to be short and hook the reader in.
- Why should they link to you? — Your pitch needs to be compelling: What’s in it for them and why is your content link-worthy?
For example, here’s how we wrote our outreach email based on the three questions:


Here’s another outreach email we wrote, this time for a campaign building links to our content marketing statistics post:


4. Follow up, once
People are busy and their inboxes are crowded. They might have missed your email or read it and forgot.
Solve this by sending a short polite follow-up.


One is good enough. There’s no need to spam the other person with countless follow-up emails hoping for a different outcome. If they’re not interested, they’re not interested.
Link outreach tips
In theory, link outreach is simply finding the right person and asking them for a link. But there is more to it than that. I’ll explore some additional tips to help improve your outreach.
Don’t over-personalize
Some SEOs swear by the sniper approach to link outreach. That is: Each email is 100% customized to the person you are targeting.
But our experience taught us that over-personalization isn’t better. We ran link-building campaigns that sent hyper-personalized emails and got no results.
It makes logical sense: Most people just don’t do favors for strangers. I’m not saying it doesn’t happen—it does—but rarely will your amazing, hyper-personalized pitch change someone’s mind.
So, don’t spend all your time tweaking your email just to eke out minute gains.
Avoid common templates
My first reaction seeing this email is to delete it:


Why? Because it’s a template I’ve seen many times in my inbox. And so have many others.
Another reason: Not only did he reference a post I wrote six years ago, it was a guest post, i.e., I do not have control over the site. This shows why finding the right prospects is important. He even got my name wrong.
Templates do work, but bad ones don’t. You can’t expect to copy-paste one from a blog post and hope to achieve success.
A better approach is to use the scoped shotgun approach: use a template but with dynamic variables.


You can do this with tools like Pitchbox and Buzzstream.
This can help achieve a decent level of personalization so your email isn’t spammy. But it doesn’t spend all your time writing customized emails for every prospect.
Send lots of emails
When we polled 800+ people on X and LinkedIn about their link outreach results, the average conversion rate was only 1-5%.


This is why you need to send more emails. If you run the numbers, it just makes sense:
- 100 outreach emails with a 1% success rate = 1 link
- 1,000 outreach emails with a 1% success rate = 10 links
I’m not saying to spam everyone. But if you want more high-quality links, you need to reach out to more high-quality prospects.
Build a brand
A few years ago, we published a link building case study:
- 515 outreach emails
- 17.55% reply rate
- 5.75% conversion rate
Pretty good results! Except the top comments were about how we only succeeded because of our brand:


It’s true; we acknowledge it. But I think the takeaway here isn’t that we should repeat the experiment with an unknown website. The takeaway is that more SEOs should be focused on building a brand.
We’re all humans—we rely on heuristics to make judgments. In this case, it’s branding. If your brand is recognizable, it solves the “stranger” problem—people know you, like you, and are more likely to link.
The question then: How do you build a brand?
I’d like to quote our Chief Marketing Officer Tim Soulo here:
What is a strong brand if not a consistent output of high-quality work that people enjoy? Ahrefs’ content team has been publishing top-notch content for quite a few years on our blog and YouTube channel. Slowly but surely, we were able to reach tens of millions of people and instill the idea that “Ahrefs’ content = quality content”—which now clearly works to our advantage.
Ahrefs was once unknown, too. So, don’t be disheartened if no one is willing to link to you today. Rome wasn’t built in a day.
Trust the process and create incredible content. Show it to people. You’ll build your brand and reputation that way.
Build relationships with people in your industry
Outreach starts before you even ask for a link.
Think about it: People don’t do favors for strangers but they will for friends. If you want to build and maintain relationships in the industry, way before you start any link outreach campaigns.
Don’t just rely on emails either. Direct messages (DMs) on LinkedIn and X, phone calls—they all work. For example, Patrick Stox, our Product Advisor, used to have a list of contacts he regularly reached out to. He’d hop on calls and even send fruit baskets.
Create systems and automations
In its most fundamental form, link outreach is really about finding more people and sending more emails.
Doing this well is all about building systems and automations.
We have a few videos on how to build a team and a link-building system, so I recommend that you check them out.
Final thoughts
Good link outreach is indistinguishable from good business development.
In business development, your chances of success will increase if you:
- Pitch the right partners
- Have a strong brand
- Have prior relationships with them
- Pitch the right collaboration ideas
The same goes for link outreach. Follow the principles above and you will see more success for your link outreach campaigns.
Any questions or comments? Let me know on Twitter X.
SEO
Research Shows Tree Of Thought Prompting Better Than Chain Of Thought

Researchers discovered a way to defeat the safety guardrails in GPT4 and GPT4-Turbo, unlocking the ability to generate harmful and toxic content, essentially beating a large language model with another large language model.
The researchers discovered that the use of tree-of-thought (ToT)reasoning to repeat and refine a line of attack was useful for jailbreaking another large language model.
What they found is that the ToT approach was successful against GPT4, GPT4-Turbo, and PaLM-2, using a remarkably low number of queries to obtain a jailbreak, on average less than thirty queries.
Tree Of Thoughts Reasoning
A Google research paper from around May 2022 discovered Chain of Thought Prompting.
Chain of Thought (CoT) is a prompting strategy used on a generative AI to make it follow a sequence of steps in order to solve a problem and complete a task. The CoT method is often accompanied with examples to show the LLM how the steps work in a reasoning task.
So, rather than just ask a generative AI like Midjourney or ChatGPT to do a task, the chain of thought method instructs the AI how to follow a path of reasoning that’s composed of a series of steps.
Tree of Thoughts (ToT) reasoning, sometimes referred to as Tree of Thought (singular) is essentially a variation and improvement of CoT, but they’re two different things.
Tree of Thoughts reasoning is similar to CoT. The difference is that rather than training a generative AI to follow a single path of reasoning, ToT is built on a process that allows for multiple paths so that the AI can stop and self-assess then come up with alternate steps.
Tree of Thoughts reasoning was developed in May 2023 in a research paper titled Tree of Thoughts: Deliberate Problem Solving with Large Language Models (PDF)
The research paper describes Tree of Thought:
“…we introduce a new framework for language model inference, Tree of Thoughts (ToT), which generalizes over the popular Chain of Thought approach to prompting language models, and enables exploration over coherent units of text (thoughts) that serve as intermediate steps toward problem solving.
ToT allows LMs to perform deliberate decision making by considering multiple different reasoning paths and self-evaluating choices to decide the next course of action, as well as looking ahead or backtracking when necessary to make global choices.
Our experiments show that ToT significantly enhances language models’ problem-solving abilities…”
Tree Of Attacks With Pruning (TAP)
This new method of jailbreaking large language models is called Tree of Attacks with Pruning, TAP. TAP uses two LLMs, one for attacking and the other for evaluating.
TAP is able to outperform other jailbreaking methods by significant margins, only requiring black-box access to the LLM.
A black box, in computing, is where one can see what goes into an algorithm and what comes out. But what happens in the middle is unknown, thus it’s said to be in a black box.
Tree of thoughts (TAP) reasoning is used against a targeted LLM like GPT-4 to repetitively try different prompting, assess the results, then if necessary change course if that attempt is not promising.
This is called a process of iteration and pruning. Each prompting attempt is analyzed for the probability of success. If the path of attack is judged to be a dead end, the LLM will “prune” that path of attack and begin another and better series of prompting attacks.
This is why it’s called a “tree” in that rather than using a linear process of reasoning which is the hallmark of chain of thought (CoT) prompting, tree of thought prompting is non-linear because the reasoning process branches off to other areas of reasoning, much like a human might do.
The attacker issues a series of prompts, the evaluator evaluates the responses to those prompts and then makes a decision as to what the next path of attack will be by making a call as to whether the current path of attack is irrelevant or not, plus it also evaluates the results to determine the likely success of prompts that have not yet been tried.
What’s remarkable about this approach is that this process reduces the number of prompts needed to jailbreak GPT-4. Additionally, a greater number of jailbreaking prompts are discovered with TAP than with any other jailbreaking method.
The researchers observe:
“In this work, we present Tree of Attacks with Pruning (TAP), an automated method for generating jailbreaks that only requires black-box access to the target LLM.
TAP utilizes an LLM to iteratively refine candidate (attack) prompts using tree-of-thoughts reasoning until one of the generated prompts jailbreaks the target.
Crucially, before sending prompts to the target, TAP assesses them and prunes the ones unlikely to result in jailbreaks.
Using tree-of-thought reasoning allows TAP to navigate a large search space of prompts and pruning reduces the total number of queries sent to the target.
In empirical evaluations, we observe that TAP generates prompts that jailbreak state-of-the-art LLMs (including GPT4 and GPT4-Turbo) for more than 80% of the prompts using only a small number of queries. This significantly improves upon the previous state-of-the-art black-box method for generating jailbreaks.”
Tree Of Thought (ToT) Outperforms Chain Of Thought (CoT) Reasoning
Another interesting conclusion reached in the research paper is that, for this particular task, ToT reasoning outperforms CoT reasoning, even when adding pruning to the CoT method, where off topic prompting is pruned and discarded.
ToT Underperforms With GPT 3.5 Turbo
The researchers discovered that ChatGPT 3.5 Turbo didn’t perform well with CoT, revealing the limitations of GPT 3.5 Turbo. Actually, GPT 3.5 performed exceedingly poorly, dropping from 84% success rate to only a 4.2% success rate.
This is their observation about why GPT 3.5 underperforms:
“We observe that the choice of the evaluator can affect the performance of TAP: changing the attacker from GPT4 to GPT3.5-Turbo reduces the success rate from 84% to 4.2%.
The reason for the reduction in success rate is that GPT3.5-Turbo incorrectly determines that the target model is jailbroken (for the provided goal) and, hence, preemptively stops the method.
As a consequence, the variant sends significantly fewer queries than the original method…”
What This Mean For You
While it’s amusing that the researchers use the ToT method to beat an LLM with another LLM, it also highlights the usefulness of ToT for generating surprising new directions in prompting in order to achieve higher levels of output.
- TL/DR Takeaways:
- Tree of Thought prompting outperformed Chain of Thought methods
- GPT 3.5 worked significantly poorly in comparison to GPT 4 in ToT
- Pruning is a useful part of a prompting strategy
- Research showed that ToT is superior to CoT in an intensive reasoning task like jailbreaking an LLM
Read the original research paper:
Tree of Attacks: Jailbreaking Black-Box LLMs Automatically (PDF)
Featured Image by Shutterstock/THE.STUDIO
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