Second one of these. Same rule as last time: real numbers, no filter, published whether the month was good or not. If you missed the first report, the short version was: 8 months old, DR 4.3, 99 clicks and $10 in revenue over the prior quarter, and a CTR problem worth worrying about. This is the update, one month later.
The honest one-line summary: revenue hasn’t moved, Domain Rating hasn’t moved, but the site’s footprint in Google Search Console just grew by 46% in a matter of days. Make of that what you will — I’m still not sure yet either.
📊 The Numbers (Last 3 Months, via Google Search Console, as of July 19, 2026)
102
Total Clicks (was 99)
81,651
Impressions (was 82,426)
0.125%
Average CTR (was 0.120%)
$10
Affiliate Revenue (unchanged)
DR 4.2
Domain Rating (was 4.3)
140
Pages With GSC Data (was 96)
The Honest Headline: Everything’s Flat Except the One Thing I Didn’t Expect
Revenue: still $10. Domain Rating: 4.2, technically down a tenth of a point from 4.3 — within measurement noise, but “down” all the same, and a plain reminder that 27 new content clusters and one genuinely good backlink don’t move DR by themselves. Impressions actually dipped slightly, 82,426 to 81,651. Clicks crept up from 99 to 102 — three more clicks in a month, which is either a rounding error or the first flicker of the CTR fixes from last quarter finally doing something. I genuinely can’t tell which yet, and I’d rather say that than pretend three clicks is a trend.
The number that actually surprised me: the count of pages showing any data at all in Search Console jumped from 96 to 140 — a 46% increase in a few weeks. That’s not clicks, and it’s barely impressions yet. It’s Google noticing the site exists at a lot more URLs than it used to. Whether that turns into anything is next month’s question, not this one’s.
What We Actually Did This Round
This was the biggest content quarter this site has had:
- 27 new content clusters, covering automation (Make.com, Zapier, n8n, Pabbly Connect), AI video (Synthesia, Descript, Fliki, Murf), AI image generation (OpenArt, Artspace, Depositphotos, Vista Create), AI voice (Voicewave), landing pages and lead-gen (Carrd, Landerlab, Woorise), SEO tools (SE Ranking), productivity (Notion), and several more AI-writing tools (Contentbot, Copyspace, Simplified).
- A full Dutch translation of the entire backlog — 105 NL articles, hand-translated (not machine-translated) preserving every affiliate link, schema block, and FAQ structure from the English originals, then linked as proper Polylang translation pairs so the site is genuinely bilingual, not just “has some Dutch pages.”
- 9 consolidation/roundup articles cross-linking the reviews above into “best of” guides (automation tools, stock photo sites, AppSumo lifetime deals, and three AI-writing-tool roundups split by actual use case rather than one generic list).
None of that shows up as revenue yet, same disclaimer as last time. Content is still a lagging indicator. But 140 pages with GSC data instead of 96 is at least evidence the content exists where Google can see it, which is a prerequisite for everything else.
The .edu Backlink: What One Good Link Actually Does (and Doesn’t)
The actual headline link-building news: a confirmed backlink from Texas Tech University (DR 82) — by a wide margin the strongest referring domain this site has. If you’re wondering why that didn’t move the needle on DR 4.2 vs 4.3 above: one link, however strong, is one data point in a formula that weighs the whole referring-domain profile. It matters, and it’s the kind of link this site needs a lot more of, not proof that one link fixes a DR problem on its own. I’m flagging that explicitly because it would be easy to lead with “we got a DR 82 backlink!” and let readers assume DR jumped — it didn’t, at least not yet, and I’d rather say so than let the framing do the exaggerating for me.
The Rejections: Also Part of the Story
Two affiliate program applications went out this round and both came back no:
- StackSocial — application submitted, not yet approved (still pending as of publish, not a hard no, but no tracked link exists yet).
- ElevenLabs (via PartnerStack) — declined.
Neither is a disaster and neither is hidden here. A DR 4.2 site with 99-102 monthly clicks isn’t an attractive affiliate partner yet from the other side of the table — approval processes for established programs skew toward sites with traffic and authority this one doesn’t have yet. That’s not a complaint, it’s just the mechanism, and it’s the same mechanism that makes the .edu backlink and the link-building push below matter more than any single piece of content.
Early Signals Worth Watching (Not Celebrating Yet)
A handful of things from the newest content are worth naming, without overstating them:
- woorise-vs-gleam is already sitting at position 1 for its target query — for a page published within the last week. That’s either a genuinely low-competition query or a good early sign; I won’t know which for another month or two.
- vista-create-review is averaging position 4.83 — also from content published in the same window.
- Two older, CTR-repaired pages — gptzero-review and how-to-use-gptzero — each picked up 6 clicks this period, up from essentially zero before the title/meta rewrites from last quarter’s Phase 1 work. That’s the smallest sample size imaginable, but it’s also the first time I can point to a specific fix and a specific, attributable result, rather than an aggregate number moving for unclear reasons.
I’m deliberately not calling any of this a trend. Three data points from brand-new content and two data points from a fix made a quarter ago are not a pattern yet. They’re the first individual threads that might become one.
What Didn’t Work (Still)
- CTR is still, structurally, the core problem. 0.125% against an industry benchmark of 2-5% means the vast majority of the site’s visibility still isn’t converting into visits, new content or old.
- Domain Rating did not grow, despite the single best backlink this site has ever earned. That’s the clearest evidence yet that DR/DA growth, not content volume, is this site’s actual bottleneck going into the next quarter.
- Two affiliate rejections this round, covered honestly above rather than left out.
What’s Next
The second deliberate link-building round starts now: a fresh pass on .edu resource pages and broken-link building in adjacent niches, two to three new GitHub awesome-list submissions, a new round of guest-post prospecting with the same red-flag screening as last time, and updated HARO/Qwoted templates covering the automation, AI-video, and AI-image clusters that didn’t exist when the first templates were written. Realistically: I’d count 5-10 more relevant referring domains from this push as a solid result, same bar as last time, not a moonshot.
Next month’s report will say whether any of that moved DR, whether the 140-pages signal turned into real impressions, and whether $10 in total revenue is still $10. I’d rather report no change honestly than manufacture a better-sounding update.
The short version: DR 4.2 (flat), $10 revenue (flat), 102 clicks (barely up from 99) — but 140 pages now show data in GSC, up from 96, and a couple of brand-new pages are already ranking well. One DR 82 backlink from Texas Tech didn’t move DR by itself, and two affiliate applications (StackSocial, ElevenLabs) didn’t land this round either. Second link-building push starts now.
Same offer as last time: if you’re running something similar and want to compare notes, or you think a link or mention makes sense for both of us, reach out. I still read everything.
