4 days after submitting to Google Search Console: 0 → 57 indexed pages. Here's exactly what I did.
I built an AI-readable directory with 629 SaaS projects. For three months it was completely invisible to Google. Zero indexed pages. Zero impressions.
Last week I finally sat down and did the boring SEO/GEO work I'd been putting off. Four days later, here's where we are:
- 57 pages indexed by Google
- 115 more crawled and sitting in queue
- 46 search impressions (from zero)
- Trend line going straight up
What actually moved the needle:
- Registered the domain property in Google Search Console (not just the URL prefix — the full domain via DNS verification)
- Made sure the sitemap was clean — 690+ URLs, all returning 200, proper priority and changeFrequency tags
- Manually submitted 20 high-priority URLs through the "Request Indexing" tool (you get ~12/day)
- Created a Wikidata entity for the product (Q141055815) — this gives AI models a verified reference point
- Added FAQPage structured data with questions people actually type into AI assistants ("How do I get my business recommended by ChatGPT?")
- Already had llms.txt and MCP endpoint exposed — so AI crawlers had something machine-readable to consume
The thing that surprised me: Google started picking up project pages I never manually submitted. It found them through the sitemap on its own. "ghostprompter," "layerbase," "vector dev" — all showing up in queries now.
Still at position 23.6 average (page 2-3 of results), zero clicks yet. But the trajectory is clear and the hard part — getting Google to even acknowledge the site exists — is done.
Next milestone: getting those 115 queued pages promoted to indexed, and breaking into page 1 for at least a few project-specific queries.
Anyone else gone through this grind recently? Curious what your timeline looked like from first submission to first click.
The jump to 57 indexed pages is a useful milestone, but the zero-click result makes the next stage more interesting than the indexing itself. It’ll be telling to see whether the new visibility turns into meaningful traffic.
One thing I'm still trying to figure out: Google indexed 57 pages in 4 days, but 115 are stuck in "Crawled - currently not indexed."
For those of you with larger sites — did your queued pages eventually get indexed on their own, or did you have to do something specific to push them over the line? Internal linking? More backlinks? Just patience?
Also curious if anyone's tracked whether Wikidata actually moved the needle for AI citations, or if it's more of a long-game signal.
(Link's in my profile if anyone wants to see the setup — it's a directory that structures projects so AI assistants can actually read and cite them.)
Totally agree zero-click is exactly the right thing to watch,
and honestly it reframes what "success" even means here.
My working theory: in an LLM-first world the win isn't the click,
it's being the cited source. If an assistant answers someone's
question and names the project as where it got that from, that's
brand authority even with zero clicks and the clicks that DO
come are pre-qualified (someone who already got a straight answer
and still wanted to dig deeper).
But you're right that it's unproven at my scale. I'm tracking two
things over the next few weeks: (1) referral traffic from AI
sources specifically, and (2) whether "cited but not clicked"
correlates with anything downstream. Happy to post the real
numbers here either way including if it turns out zero-click
kills the value.