Ahrefs — average #1 ranking page is 5 years old; 72.9% of top 10 is 3+ years
Created 2026-06-23
Summary
Claim: Ahrefs found:
- 72.9% of pages in Google's top 10 are more than 3 years old.
- The average #1 ranking page is 5 years old (up from 2 years in 2017).
Independent corroboration: SE Ranking (vendor) reports a majority of top-10 domains are 15+ years old.
Source: Ahrefs + SE Ranking (both vendor).
Confidence: Industry-consensus across vendor datasets.
Why this matters for Candid: A new domain in 2026 is competing against a #1 page that took 5 years to get there. The widget should reflect this in its timeframe expectations — for a young domain, "moderate" difficulty still implies multi-year compounding.