The first 90 days of a new site, month by month, with the work shipped beside it
You have shipped the pages, the numbers are close to zero, and nothing tells you whether that is normal or whether the whole approach is wrong.
Month one earned 31 clicks. Month two, 346. Month three, 1,131. The same site earned 39,423 clicks in a single month eight months later. Nothing about the first quarter predicted the rest, which is why the first quarter is a terrible time to make decisions.
Every month, with the changes shipped
The left column is the number of changes shipped that month, taken from the change log rather than from memory.
| Month | Changes shipped | Clicks | Impressions | CTR |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dec 2025 (7 days) | 32 | 31 | 106 | 29.25% |
| Jan 2026 | 33 | 346 | 3,208 | 10.79% |
| Feb 2026 | 12 | 1,131 | 25,058 | 4.51% |
| Mar 2026 | 47 | 2,052 | 24,385 | 8.42% |
| Apr 2026 | 32 | 4,409 | 73,282 | 6.02% |
| May 2026 | 0 | 7,115 | 177,473 | 4.01% |
| Jun 2026 | 11 | 8,068 | 218,834 | 3.69% |
| Jul 2026 | 14 | 16,410 | 604,348 | 2.72% |
The row that changes how you read your own dashboard
May shipped zero changes and grew 61%, from 4,409 clicks to 7,115. The traffic arriving in any given month was earned by work shipped roughly a quarter earlier. When you judge this month's work by this month's numbers, you are grading the wrong homework, and the most common consequence is abandoning something that was about to pay.
Why the early CTR is high and means nothing
Month one shows 29.25%, which looks excellent and is an artifact: 31 clicks on 106 impressions, almost all of them people already looking for the name. As real impressions arrive the rate falls, and that fall is the site being shown to strangers rather than the site getting worse.
What to actually watch in the first quarter
Not clicks. Watch whether the number of distinct queries returning impressions is rising, and whether pages are being crawled and indexed at all. Those move within weeks and they tell you whether the engine understands the site. Clicks are a lagging measure of something you cannot see yet.
Cite this
Mailarpawar, P. (2026). The first 90 days of a new site, month by month, with the work shipped beside it. RankHonestly. Measured on 267 days of Google Search Console data. https://rankhonestly.com/case-study/first-90-days
These figures are free to quote, republish and chart, with a link back.
Use the numbers
- Run this on your own export
- /guides/how-long-until-a-new-site-ranks
- /guides/first-90-days-seo
- /guides/how-long-does-google-take-to-index
More from the same dataset
- CTR by Google position, measured on one site instead of averaged across many
- Brand search was 49.3% of clicks, and converted 16 times better
The whole record
This page is one table out of it. The book is all of it, for $19 once. What is in the book, or read the introduction, free to read.