I run a small tech-interview-prep site. It has 8,664 individual pages, one per concept — each with a real question, what it's actually testing, a model answer and the mistake that sinks candidates. Programmatic SEO, the whole playbook.
| | | |---|---| | Impressions | 6,511 | | Clicks | 9 | | CTR | 0.14% | | Average position | 45.9 | | Pages with at least one impression | 1,575 of 8,664 (18%) |
I want to walk through this honestly, because the conclusion I reached is not the one I expected, and it's not the one most posts about programmatic SEO land on.
My working theory for weeks was "Google isn't indexing them." That's the standard programmatic-SEO failure story: you publish thousands of pages, Google decides your new domain hasn't earned the crawl budget, and most of them sit in Search Console under Discovered — currently not indexed forever.
And early on that was true. A few weeks ago only 6 pages had ever received an impression.
It's now 1,575. Google is indexing them, steadily, without me doing anything new. The crawl budget arrived on its own schedule.
Here's the distribution that explains everything. Across 1,206 distinct queries:
| Position | Share of queries | |---|---| | 1–10 | 12% | | 11–20 | 6% | | 21–50 | 23% | | 51+ | 59% |
That's page six of the search results. Nobody has ever been to page six of the search results.
So the pages aren't missing from the index. They're in the index, ranked below anything a human will scroll to. Indexed and invisible are close to the same thing, and the second one is more annoying because the dashboard fills up with numbers that look like progress.
6,511 impressions is real. It's also what position 58 produces: Google shows your result to enough people that you see the impression, and none of them scroll far enough to see it.
Look at what these are. "Post mortem template", "error budget", "component team" — these are established, well-covered terms. Every one of them has a decade of results from Atlassian, Google SRE, Martin Fowler, and a hundred consultancies with real backlink profiles.
I generated a page for each of them because the concept belonged in the corpus. But generating a page about "error budget" doesn't make me a candidate for that query. It makes me the 95th-best candidate, and Google is telling me so precisely.
The pages ranking best are the weird ones: "blockers vs impediment" at 28, "prerendering vs ssr" at 33, "awq vs gptq". Narrow, comparative, recent. The places where there genuinely isn't already a definitive answer.
Rendering. Next.js App Router, ISR. Pages are server-rendered HTML, not client-hydrated shells. curl returns the full content.
Crawl paths. Every page is reachable from a topic hub, which is reachable from the homepage. Nothing is orphaned behind a search box.
Canonicals. One canonical per concept. Near-duplicate titles get collapsed to the oldest published version, so "Client-side vs server-side" and "Client-Side vs. Server-Side" don't compete with each other.
Sitemaps and structured data. Valid, submitted, hasPart, FAQPage, isAccessibleForFree. All parsing correctly.