Benchmark #2 (Industry-consensus): Ahrefs May 2025 — only 1.74% of new pages reach top 10 within a year (6.11% non-empty English); 40.82% of those that rank top 10 do so within month 1; 2017 comparison was 5.7%

Claim: Ahrefs (Patrick Stox, "How Long Does It Take to Rank in Google?", May 15, 2025) tracked 1M URLs first seen by Ahrefs' crawler in September 2023, plus 2M URLs created October 2023 filtered to non-empty English content, for one year.

• Only 1.74% of new pages reached the top 10 within a year (98.26% did not).
• Filtered to non-empty English content: 6.11%.
• Of pages that DID rank top 10, 40.82% did so within the first month; high-search-volume terms, when they ranked, were more likely to rank in the first month, while low-volume terms were spread more evenly.
• 2017 comparison: 5.7% reached top 10 within a year; in 2017 only 0.3% of high-volume keywords ranked top 10 within a year.

The 5.7% → 1.74% drop between 2017 and 2025 is the single strongest large-sample signal that the environment got harder for new pages over the period.

Source: Ahrefs (Patrick Stox), "How Long Does It Take to Rank in Google?", May 15, 2025.

Method: 1M random URLs first seen Sept 2023 + 2M URLs Oct 2023 (non-empty English filter); tracked 1 year via Ahrefs crawler/SERP data.

Distribution or average? Distribution (with tail).

Confidence: Industry-consensus. Large sample, disclosed method.

Caveat: Product-incentivized — Ahrefs sells SEO tooling whose value proposition is "ranking is hard." "First seen by Ahrefs crawler" is a proxy for publication date and may lag. Pages that never rank for any tracked keyword are invisible to the click-side of the funnel.