3 weeks after launch: 170 impressions/day, position 80, zero clicks. Here's my plan.

I launched QRCodePrime on June 20, a free QR code generator. The pitch is no fine print: no watermarks, no signup for downloads, static codes never expire and are generated in the browser so the data never touches my servers.

Three weeks in, here's the honest scoreboard:

• Google impressions: 60 to 170 per day, average position 75 to 85

• Clicks from Google: one. A single click, on the Spotify QR page

• Bing: completely unindexed until this week (turned out I needed IndexNow, the sitemap alone did nothing for 6 months on an earlier setup)

• Lighthouse mobile 66, desktop 96, which beats every competitor I measured. One big-name QR site scored 29 with a 22 second LCP

What I've learned: content and site speed were never the bottleneck. I have 37 pages live, product pages, industry pages, long blog posts, full structured data. Google can see it all and ranks it on page 8 anyway.

The bottleneck is authority. Zero backlinks, zero third-party mentions. A 3-week-old domain with no one vouching for it ranks exactly where mine does.

So the current plan is unglamorous: 20 directory submissions with unique copy for each (identical blurbs across sites read as spam), then Reddit and Quora where genuinely useful, then comparison content. Product Hunt later, once I can do it properly. I expect nothing to move for months and I'm fine with that.

Question for anyone who's grown a free tool with SEO: at what point did backlinks actually start moving your rankings, and what was the first link that mattered?