Benchmark #5 (Single-source): Semrush 2022 (28,000 new domains, 13 months) — 41% reached top 10 by month 6; 19% reached and HELD; 27% of top-10 reachers stayed all year; <5% held first page for a year; 92% failed to stay in top 100; 4.2% held a top-10 keyword all 13 months

Claim: Semrush, "How Long Does It Take to Rank Higher on Google" (28,000 new domains, July 2021–July 2022):

• ~41% were ranking in the top 10 after six months (at some point), but only 19% reached the top 10 by month 6 and maintained it to the end.
• Of websites that made it to the top 10, 27% remained there the entire study.
• Fewer than 5% maintained first-page rankings for a year.
• 92% failed to stay in the top 100 across the year.
• 4.2% "managed to have at least one top-10 keyword ranking for all 13 months of the study."
• Nearly 10% appeared in the top 10 in only one month of the year.
• 55.1% of domains that failed to reach the top 10 had no backlinks.

Source: Semrush, "How Long Does It Take to Rank Higher on Google," 2022 (data 2021–2022).

Method: 28,000 domains never seen in Semrush's US database before July 2021 but ranking somewhere in the top 100 for ≥1 keyword by study start; tracked 13 months.

Distribution or average? Distribution.

Confidence: Single-source for the headline percentages.

Caveat: Product-incentivized, but the bigger issue is severe selection bias: the sample is defined as domains that already ranked in the top 100 for at least one keyword. This excludes the much larger universe of new domains that never ranked at all — meaning the figures systematically understate time-to-traction for a truly random new site. Read every Semrush figure against this filter.