We deal with the so-called Ahlfors regular sets (also known as $s$-regular sets) in metric spaces. First we show that those sets correspond to a certain class of tree-like structures. Building on this observation we then study the following question: Under which conditions does the limit ${lim}_{\epsilon \to 0+}{\epsilon }^{s}N(\epsilon ,K)$ exist, where $K$ is an $s$-regular set and $N(\epsilon ,K)$ is for instance the $\epsilon$-packing number of $K$?

In this article we study the Ahlfors regular conformal gauge of a compact metric space $(X,d)$, and its conformal dimension ${dim}_{AR}(X,d)$. Using a sequence of finite coverings of $(X,d)$, we construct distances in its Ahlfors regular conformal gauge of controlled Hausdorff dimension. We obtain in this way a combinatorial description, up to bi-Lipschitz homeomorphisms, of all the metrics in the gauge. We show how to compute ${dim}_{AR}(X,d)$ using the critical exponent $Q_N$ associated to the combinatorial modulus.

For every ε > 0, any subset of ℝⁿ with Hausdorff dimension larger than (1-ε)n must have ultrametric distortion larger than 1/(4ε).