Five pages out of 227 earned 75.2% of the traffic
You are deciding how much effort to put into the next page, and you have no idea whether pages pay off evenly or not at all.
One page took 33.9% of all clicks. Five took 75.2%. Ten took 87.9%. Of 227 URLs, 134 of 227 earned fewer than ten clicks in 267 days. Nobody could have named the winners in advance, including the person who built them.
The concentration
The shape held while the site nearly tripled in size, which is the part that makes it a rule rather than a phase.
| Top N pages | Share of all clicks |
|---|---|
| 1 | 33.9% |
| 3 | 58.7% |
| 5 | 75.2% |
| 10 | 87.9% |
| 20 | 95.6% |
The strategy this implies
If you cannot predict which pages win, the correct response is not better prediction. It is to make each attempt cheap enough that being wrong most of the time is survivable, and then to spend disproportionately on the few that show signs of life. Most advice does the reverse: enormous effort on a small number of pages chosen up front.
How to find your own live ones early
Sort your pages by impressions rather than clicks. Impressions arrive months before clicks do, so a page gathering impressions at a bad position is the earliest visible signal that the engine considers it relevant. Those are the pages worth another day of work.
Cite this
Mailarpawar, P. (2026). Five pages out of 227 earned 75.2% of the traffic. RankHonestly. Measured on 267 days of Google Search Console data. https://rankhonestly.com/case-study/traffic-concentration
These figures are free to quote, republish and chart, with a link back.
Use the numbers
More from the same dataset
- Programmatic SEO, measured: 11 of 94 pages earned 88.6% of the clicks
- CTR by Google position, measured on one site instead of averaged across many
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 Chapter 29, free to read.