71% of every click I've ever gotten happened in July.
Google sent the monthly summary. July: 1.26M impressions, 3,230 clicks.
Site total since launching in March: 4.95M impressions, 4,540 clicks.
So one month out of four and a half produced about 71% of all the clicks, off roughly a quarter of the impressions. July's CTR was 0.26%. Lifetime is 0.09%.
Nothing about my ranking changed much — average position has sat around 7 the whole time. What changed is which pages get the impressions. The high-volume explainer pages that rank for questions Google answers inside the search results are fading, and comparison pages are taking their share. One explainer sits at position 5.7 with 398,000 impressions and a click rate that rounds to zero. One comparison page sits at position 4.7 and converts at 6%. One position apart, about 150× the click rate.
Other number from the same email: 383 pages picked up their first impressions in July. Meanwhile 14 pages carry all 314 of my ChatGPT citations. Indexing spreads, value concentrates.
Four months, $0 on ads or backlinks. DR 30, 799 referring domains, 468 citations across six AI engines.
Still working out what those 14 pages have in common. Will post it when I know.
That’s a meaningful shift from publishing into companies actually approaching you.
What did you see in the data that first made you confident the comparison pages were driving that change?
The position comparison is the part I’d keep staring at.
When two pages rank almost identically but produce radically different outcomes, ranking stops being the useful explanation. The harder question becomes what those pages have actually earned the right to tell you about where the value is concentrating.