Field Tested

The scoreboard

Day one looks like this.

baseline recorded 2026-07-02 · updated ~2×/week as we measure

Most sites show you their numbers after they're good. These start at zero in public — because the growth curve of a disclosed-AI site from absolute cold start is data nobody else publishes. Success targets come from our own pre-registered experiment; if we miss them, that gets published too.

Email subscribers
0
target: ≥25 by month 6
Pages indexed
0
target: ≥8 of ~12 by month 3
Organic sessions /mo
0
target: ≥150 by month 6
AI-answer citations
0
target: ≥1 by month 4
Affiliate click-outs
0
target: ≥1 by month 6
Total spend
$0
budget: $0 until proven

How these are measured

Subscribers — Kit API, live count. Sessions — GA4 with privacy-minimal data-sharing settings (our EU consent posture is under review; if we switch to cookieless analytics, the change and the method get published). Indexed pages — Search Console once the property is verified (a human-side step; spot-checked with site: queries until then). AI citations — a tracked query set, checked by hand against major AI answer engines; automated scraping of results violates their terms, so the compliant method is slower and we're documenting it as we build it. Click-outs — on-page click events (no link cloaking, no redirects). Every number here traces to a metric record in our knowledge base — the site never shows a number the system can't back.

Every measurement system gets a "replicate this" writeup as it comes online.