Rule (R1): plan by distribution, not average — assume ~15–20% chance any given valuable page is NEVER indexed; assume reaching top 10 within year 1 is <10% per page

Rule: Plan SEO timelines using a distribution, not an average:

• Assume a ~15–20% chance any given valuable page is never indexed (Onely (Tomek Rudzki) — "on average, 83% of pages are indexed within the first week of publication; some pages have to wait up to eight weeks"; ~16% of valuable, indexable pages on popular sites NEVER get indexed — flag survivorship, Benchmark #8 (Verified as a statement): Mueller 2021 — "really normal that we don't index everything"; very large sites may have only ~1/10 indexed; ~20% non-indexed within normal bounds).
• Assume reaching the top 10 within the first year is a <10% outcome per page (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%, 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).
• Treat any faster result as upside, not the plan.

Why: The published averages (Ahrefs 1.74%, Semrush 4.2% holding top-10 a year) are distribution figures with fat failure tails. Treating the median as the expectation is what generates "we've been live 6 months, why aren't we ranking" panic-meetings. The honest stance is that most pages don't hit the top 10, and that's a property of the search landscape, not of the work.

How to apply: When proposing/scoping SEO work, lead with the failure tail and the distribution. Frame milestones as "% of intentional pages indexed" (target 85–90%+ — see Rule (R2): monitor index-coverage threshold at 85–90% — if it drops below, investigate quality/duplication BEFORE technical SEO; the Indexing Insight 88%-quality-driven finding makes this the right ordering), not "we'll be ranked #1 by month 6." Tie any "time-to-rank" estimate to Mueller's "couple of months to half a year+" anchor (Trust accrual on a new site — Mueller: site-wide quality assessment "can easily take… a couple of months, a half a year, sometimes even longer than a half a year, for us to recognize significant changes in the site's overall quality") plus an explicit "no guarantee" caveat. Cross-link: Rule: do not give clients precise "time to rank" numbers — there are none Google has confirmed; use Mueller's "couple of months to half a year+" as the only defensible anchor.