I’m starting this as a monthly series: real numbers, no filter. If you’ve ever wondered what the first few months of a brand-new affiliate site actually look like — not the “I made $10K in 30 days” survivorship-bias version, but the actual grind — this is that. CompareAITools.org went live in November 2025. This is where it stands right now.
No polish, no cherry-picking. If a number is embarrassing, it’s in here anyway. That’s the entire point of doing this publicly.
📊 The Numbers (Last 3 Months, via Google Search Console)
99
Total Clicks
82,426
Impressions
~0.12%
Average CTR
$10
Affiliate Revenue
DR 4.3
Domain Rating (DA 7)
The Honest Headline: 82K Impressions, 99 Clicks
Let’s start with the number that actually matters, because it’s the one that should worry any new site owner staring at their own Search Console for the first time: 82,426 impressions and only 99 clicks over the last three months. That’s a click-through rate of roughly 0.12% — against an industry benchmark that’s usually somewhere between 2% and 5% depending on ranking position.
That gap isn’t a traffic problem. It’s a relevance and positioning problem. Google is showing this site to people 82,000+ times and almost nobody is clicking. That usually means one (or more) of: titles that don’t match search intent, meta descriptions that don’t sell the click, or — most likely for a brand-new domain — rankings that are technically “showing up” but sitting on page 3-5, where impressions accumulate but clicks essentially don’t, because nobody scrolls that far.
I’m not going to pretend this is a minor footnote. It’s the single biggest problem this site has right now, bigger than the lack of backlinks, bigger than the $10 in revenue. Traffic-with-no-clicks is a symptom of a site that Google has indexed but doesn’t yet trust enough to rank on page 1 for anything with real search volume.
What $10 in Revenue Actually Looks Like
The honest number: $10, from a single affiliate conversion via HeyGen. That’s it. No six-figure MRR screenshot, no “how I quit my job” narrative — just one real commission, from one real reader who clicked through and signed up.
I’d rather publish that than round it up, invent a bigger number, or quietly skip this section until there’s something more flattering to show. If you’re reading this because you’re earlier-stage than I am, or considering starting something similar: this is what month one of real numbers looks like for most people. The $10K/month screenshots you see elsewhere are almost never representative of a site’s actual first few months — they’re survivorship bias, or they’re leaving out the 8 months before the screenshot was taken.
What We Actually Did This Quarter
Two content phases wrapped up in this window, both aimed directly at the CTR and ranking problem above:
- Phase 1 — CTR and technical fixes: Rewrote underperforming titles and meta descriptions across zero-click and low-CTR pages flagged by Search Console, fixed broken schema/FAQ markup, and cleaned up internal linking.
- Phase 2 — Four content clusters completed and repaired:
- Rytr cluster (review, comparisons, how-to-use)
- MailerLite / Brevo cluster (reviews, comparisons, alternatives)
- GPTZero / AI-detection cluster — this one required real triage: 21 articles were left mid-sentence from an interrupted rewrite session, with broken image placeholders and exposed AI prompts. All were completed, fact-checked against live vendor pricing (caught and fixed stale Originality.ai pricing that had drifted from a 4-tier to a 3-tier structure), and published in both English and Dutch, including full EN/NL cross-linking.
- Scalenut / Frase cluster (reviews, comparisons, how-to-use)
None of that shows up as revenue yet. Content and technical fixes are lagging indicators — the theory is that they compound into ranking improvement over the next 1-3 months, not immediately. This report is the baseline I’m measuring that theory against.
Where the Site Stands Structurally
- Domain Rating: 4.3 (Ahrefs) / Domain Authority 7 — a brand-new-site score, expected for a domain that’s 8 months old with essentially no deliberate link-building yet
- Live since: November 2025
- Content: Two full content phases complete across AI writing, AI detection, and email marketing tool clusters, in both English and Dutch
- Link-building: Effectively hasn’t started. This report marks the kickoff of the first deliberate outreach effort — resource page outreach, broken link building, directory submissions, and posts like this one
What Didn’t Work (Yet)
Being honest about this is the whole point of publishing it:
- CTR is the core problem, as covered above. 82K impressions converting to 99 clicks means the content is being found but not chosen. That’s the single thing I’m watching most closely going into next quarter.
- Zero deliberate link-building so far. A DR 4.3 site competing for keywords against DR 60-90 incumbents (Jasper, Mailchimp, Turnitin) is not going to out-rank them on content quality alone, especially not this early. That’s the gap this outreach phase is meant to start closing.
- Revenue is essentially unproven at scale. One $10 conversion tells me the funnel technically works, not that it’s optimized or repeatable yet.
What’s Next
Starting this month: the first real link-building push. Realistically, for a DR 4.3 site with zero prior outreach history, I’m not expecting fireworks — 5 to 10 new, relevant referring domains in the first month or two would already be a solid result. That’s resource page outreach, broken link building, a handful of directory submissions, and — pending approval — some HARO/Qwoted responses in the AI-writing and email-marketing space.
Next month’s report will show whether any of this moved the CTR and revenue numbers, or whether it’s still too early to tell. Either way, it’ll be published here, with the same real numbers.
The short version: 8 months in, DR 4.3, 99 clicks and $10 in revenue over the last quarter, and a glaring 0.12% CTR problem that’s the main thing to fix next. Two content phases are done; link-building starts now. I’ll keep publishing this monthly, good months and bad ones alike.
If you’re building something similar and want to compare notes, or you run a site in the AI tools / SEO / affiliate space and think a link exchange or mention makes sense for both of us — reach out. I read everything.
