I Published 30 Articles in 90 Days. Here's Every Number.

In April 2026 I registered a domain and started a blog about AI tools for solopreneurs. The plan was the one everybody recommends: pick a niche, publish consistently, build topical authority, monetize with affiliate links.

Ninety days later I have 30 published articles, 786 monthly impressions, 4 total clicks, and $0 in revenue.

This is the complete data. Every number, unedited. Not because the story is inspiring — it isn't — but because I couldn't find this data anywhere when I started, and I think that's a problem.

Everyone publishes the wins. Almost nobody publishes the ledger.

The Setup

Domain: registered April 6, 2026 (.io, ~€35/year) Stack: Next.js 14, MDX, Tailwind, deployed on Vercel (free tier) Niche: AI and SaaS tools for solopreneurs — reviews, comparisons, tutorials Model: affiliate links (Make, Tidio) + planned display ads Who: one person. Me. Full-stack developer, working evenings and weekends.

Total cash spent in 90 days: about €35. Everything else was free tier.

Total time spent: I didn't track it precisely, which was a mistake. Reconstructing from my publishing log, roughly 150-200 hours across research, writing, technical work, SEO, and daily social posts.

The Numbers

Content

Search Console (last 28 days)

The single most important number

Zero. Not "a few low-quality ones." Zero. In ninety days, not one other website on the internet linked to mine.

I'll come back to this, because it explains almost everything else.

Traffic (GA4)

Revenue

Google AdSense rejected the site on May 26 for "low value content." At the time I had 20 published articles averaging 2,500 words, all original, all based on actual tool testing. I don't think the rejection was wrong, exactly — I think it was measuring something I didn't understand yet.

What Actually Worked

I want to be precise here, because "it all failed" would be lazy and inaccurate.

Rankings improved, consistently. Average position went 66 → 50 → 44 → 43.8 over four consecutive weeks. That's real movement, and it happened with zero external authority. The content is doing something.

Topic clusters worked exactly as advertised. I built a pillar page on Zapier vs Make with four satellite articles, all cross-linked. That cluster now accounts for over half of all impressions. The strategy is sound; I'd use it again.

Indexing was fast. New articles were indexed and receiving impressions within 3-6 days. No technical SEO problems after I fixed an early DNS misconfiguration.

Keyword diversification happened. From 7 keywords in month one to 46 by month three. Google clearly understood what the site was about.

By every process metric, this was going well.

What Killed It

Then I went looking for data on how long this is actually supposed to take. That research is the reason I'm writing this post.

1. The base rate is much worse than anyone tells you

Ahrefs published a study in May 2025 analyzing millions of URLs. The finding: only about 1.74% of newly published pages reach Google's top 10 within a year. In 2017 that figure was 5.7%.

The average page ranking at position #1 today is roughly five years old. Pages less than a year old now make up 13.7% of top-10 results, down from 22%.

So the honest framing of "publish consistently and be patient" is: you have roughly a 2% chance of ranking on page one in year one, and the pages you're competing against have a five-year head start.

Nobody says it like that. The advice is technically true and practically useless.

2. Zero backlinks isn't a gap. It's the whole thing.

Semrush found that 55.1% of pages that never reached page one had zero backlinks. Not "few." Zero.

I spent three months optimizing content, internal linking, titles, meta descriptions, schema, and site speed. All of that is the 20%. The 80% — the thing that actually separates pages that rank from pages that don't — I never touched once.

I knew backlinks mattered. I treated them as something to get to later. That was the error, and it was the only error that mattered.

3. Even ranking wouldn't have saved it

This is the part that reframed everything for me.

SparkToro's analysis of the first four months of 2026 found that 68% of Google searches now end without a click. Not without a click on your site — without a click at all. The user gets the answer and leaves.

For my specific niche it's worse:

• B2B technology queries trigger AI Overviews about 82% of the time. That's the entire subject matter of my blog.
• Informational queries have a zero-click rate around 74%. That's the entire format of my blog.
• Seer Interactive measured organic CTR dropping roughly 61% when an AI Overview is present — from about 1.76% to 0.61%.
• Across 2024-2025, roughly 73% of B2B websites lost significant traffic, with average year-over-year declines around 34%.

Run the arithmetic. Suppose I'd done everything right and reached position 8 for a good keyword with 1,000 monthly searches. With an AI Overview present — which, in this niche, it usually is — I'd be looking at a click-through rate under 1%. That's fewer than 10 visitors a month. From a top-10 ranking. On a keyword I'd have spent a year fighting for.

The model I was building assumed a search ecosystem that has largely stopped existing.

4. The competition isn't who I thought

I finally looked closely at who actually ranks for my target keywords. For "Zapier alternatives," the first page is: Gumloop, G2, Zluri, Albato, Encharge, Vellum, Tadabase, Celigo.

Almost none of those are blogs. They're funded SaaS companies publishing content marketing for their own products. They have real domain authority — earned by being actual products that people link to — plus marketing teams, plus a reason to rank that has nothing to do with affiliate commissions.

I wasn't really competing with other bloggers. I was competing with companies — using a blog, as one person, in evenings and weekends. That's a different weight class, and it's worth knowing which one you're in before you step in.

What I'd Do Differently

It would be easy to write this as "the game is rigged." It isn't, and that framing wouldn't help anyone. The more useful version is: there were a few decisions that, in hindsight, I'd make differently — and they're the ones worth passing on.

The niche was the most competitive one available. "AI tools for solopreneurs" is where a large share of indie hackers, content marketers, and SaaS growth teams are currently pointed. It's a crowded room, and I underestimated how crowded. A quieter niche with the same effort would likely have produced a very different chart.

Content is the enjoyable part; distribution is the part that moves the needle. Writing and researching articles is satisfying work, and I did a lot of it. Outreach — asking other sites for links, building relationships, digital PR — is less satisfying and I did none of it. In a channel where backlinks are the deciding factor, that split matters more than I expected going in.

Validation should come before volume. Thirty articles is a meaningful bet to place before fully pressure-testing whether the bet is winnable. A few hours of SERP and base-rate research at the start would have surfaced most of what's in this post — and would have shaped the plan differently.

Process metrics are seductive. Impressions climbed, position improved, keywords diversified — all genuinely true, and all process metrics. The outcome metric, clicks, stayed flat. It's easy to keep optimizing the dashboard that's moving instead of the one that isn't.

What I'd Tell Someone Starting Today

Not "don't do it." But:

Check the SERP before you write a word. Open the top 10 for your five main keywords. If they're funded companies with real products, you are not going to out-content them from a laptop. Pick a different room.

Budget backlinks from day one or accept you're writing a diary. If you're not going to do outreach — guest posts, digital PR, cold email, original research, actual relationships — then understand that you're producing content for an audience of zero. That's a legitimate choice. It just isn't a business.

Assume informational content will not bring traffic. In 2026, "what is X" and "how to Y" content in a B2B niche is a citation play, not a traffic play. The AI answers the question. If your entire model depends on someone clicking through to read your version of an answer they already have, the model is broken.

Track hours from day one. I can only estimate my real hourly return because I didn't measure the input closely enough. If you're treating a content site as a business, treat your time as the cost it is — measure it from the start.

Publish your numbers. All of the advice I followed came from people who never showed their ledger. It occurs to me that the ones who show the ledger and the ones who sell the course are usually different people.

What Happens Now

The domain is paid through April 2027. I'm not shutting it down.

For the next nine months I'm going to do the thing I should have done first: build backlinks, optimize for AI citation rather than clicks, and build distribution I actually own rather than renting attention from an algorithm that has stopped sending it.

I'll publish the numbers again at 180 days. Same format, same honesty, whatever they say.

If they're better, that's a useful data point about what actually moves the needle. If they're worse, that's a useful data point too — and honestly, more useful than most of what's currently written about this.

Either way, you'll get the ledger.

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If you're running a content site and tracking your own numbers, I'd genuinely like to compare notes. I'm at runsolo.team@gmail.com.

Data in this post is from Google Search Console and GA4 for runsolo.io, April 6 – July 13, 2026. Research cited: Ahrefs (May 2025), Semrush, SparkToro (2026), Seer Interactive. No affiliate links in this article.