Our own Search Console, first ninety days: what a new site really sees
Most advice about new sites is written from the outside. This is the inside view: our own numbers, including the unflattering ones, and the decisions they led to.
In its first three months colleviate.com earned 1,116 Google impressions and 3 clicks, at an average position of about 54 on desktop. Nearly nine in ten impressions came from outside India. About 120 pages are indexed, with 3 waiting. Visibility is growing fast from a very low base, and almost all of it sits on page 5 or later, which is why clicks have not followed yet.
This is a case study with a single subject: this website. We are not describing a client, and nothing below is modelled. The figures come from our Search Console exports and the Page indexing report on 2 November 2026, covering web search for colleviate.com over the previous three months.
The numbers
| Measure | Result |
|---|---|
| Impressions, three months | 1,116 |
| Clicks | 3 |
| Average position, desktop | 53.6 |
| Last 14 days against the 14 before | 754 impressions against 208 |
| Impressions from India | 104, with all 3 clicks |
| Impressions from the United States | 485 |
| Pages indexed | about 120 |
| Pages waiting to be indexed | 3 (2 crawled, 1 discovered) |
The chart above shows daily impressions. They were close to zero until 22 September, hovered around 15 a day through early October, and reached about 90 on 29 October. The last day in the chart is lower because Search Console reports the most recent days incompletely.
What the data says
- A new site is invisible, then briefly visible, then visible and unclicked. The first weeks had almost no impressions. Once pages were indexed, impressions grew, but at an average position of 54 a page is shown on roughly the fifth results page, where almost nobody clicks.
- Impressions arrive before clicks, and from the wrong places. Eighty-seven percent of impressions came from outside India, mostly the United States, while the audience we want is Indian brands. The queries are English marketing terms with no national intent, so the site is being found for general topics, not for what is local to us.
- Indexing is not the problem. About 120 pages are indexed and 3 are waiting. The report also lists 8 pages as alternates of a page with the right canonical, 3 redirects and 1 blocked by an unauthorised request. Those are housekeeping, not a crisis. Our technical SEO checklist covers each status and what to do about it.
- The gap is rank, not reach. Our biggest topic by impressions, share of search, sits at an average position near 75. Five pages sit at positions 6 to 15 with no clicks. For those, the job is a better title and snippet. For the rest, it is depth and links, not more pages.
What we are changing because of it
- Fix the snippets on pages already near page one before writing anything new. A page at position 7 with 70 impressions and no clicks is a title and description problem.
- Deepen the pages that rank 40 or lower for the topics we want, and link to them from every related page, instead of writing a sibling that competes with them. The method is in internal linking for topic clusters. When we audited our own links, 23 of 118 articles had no in-body links pointing to them at all, and we fixed that before adding new content.
- Publish pieces built on our own data, such as the Share of Search Index, because a page with evidence nobody else has is the only kind a young site can win with.
- Check Search Console weekly, including the indexing report, so a rise in pages that are crawled but not indexed stops us publishing before it becomes a pattern. How to read the report is in Search Console diagnostics.
What we cannot claim
Impressions started rising on about 18 October, before our 28 October release of the larger share of search cluster, so we cannot say what caused the rise. Three clicks is too few to say anything about click-through rate. Rankings move daily, and an export is a photograph of one afternoon. We will publish the same table again after another month, whichever way it goes.
What to take from it
If your own site is new and the numbers look like ours, you are not failing. You are early. The useful questions are the ones above: is Google indexing the pages, where do they rank, and which handful are close enough to page one to be worth rewriting. If you want that read on your own site, we do it as part of a search and answer-engine review.
Sources
- Colleviate Search Console exports, 2 November 2026 (Performance and Page indexing), Colleviate, 2 Nov 2026
- Performance report (Search Console Help), Google, undated
- Page indexing report (Search Console Help), Google, undated
Questions we get asked
How long does a new website take to get search traffic?
In our case about six weeks passed before daily impressions rose above a handful, and clicks had not followed after three months. Your timeline will differ, and Google gives no guaranteed schedule.
Why does Search Console show impressions but no clicks?
Because impressions count any appearance in results, including pages far down the list. At an average position near 54, a page sits around the fifth results page, where few people click.
What does "crawled, currently not indexed" mean?
Google visited the page and chose not to add it to its index. Google lists it as a status to watch. If the number grows while you publish, slow down and improve the pages before adding more.
Is this a client case study?
No. It uses our own site and our own Search Console data, with no client information.
Want this read on your own site?
We go through your Search Console and indexing data, find the pages closest to page one and the queries nobody on your site answers, and tell you what to change first.
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