A record of search visibility rising about 25x in 5 months

Tomohiro Iida · Published July 13, 2026 · Updated July 13, 2026

This article records, using real Google Search Console (GSC) and GA4 numbers, roughly five months of search traffic after Netsujo migrated its own site, netsujo.jp, from the old platform to Next.js and built up its articles from zero.

We report the actual order in which impressions, clicks, position, and CTR moved, including the parts that improved and the side effect of falling CTR, without embellishing either direction. This is an n=1 case from a single company site, the causes are mixed, and it is not meant to prove that migrating a site is what drove the increase.

What happened over 5 months (the headline numbers)

After the migration and the article push, the first thing that moved sharply was not clicks but impressions. The real GSC figures are below (site=netsujo.jp, calendar month, dataState=final).

Impressions rose about 25x, clicks rose about 6.8x, and average position improved from 14.9 to 8.2. GA4 sessions from Organic also rose, from 108 in February to 656 in June.

The top clicked queries include branded searches for our company name. The figures above are totals that include branded search, and are not fully separated from the performance of the article content alone.

The old site's one-year plateau

Before the migration, search traffic on the old site was essentially flat. From March 2025 to January 2026, clicks moved up and down within a range of 66 to 123 per month, and average position sometimes got worse (45.7 in June 2025). We believe this reflects a limited page count, with no growing surface of information for search engines to show.

After migrating to Next.js at the end of March 2026 and then starting to publish articles, the way the numbers moved changed. What follows is the story of what we built.

What we built: the migration and 92 articles

At the time of migration, the article count was zero; the first commit in the repository is "Initial commit from Create Next App" on March 27, 2026. From there we built up articles, and as of July 13, 2026 there are 92 static articles in the codebase, and 113 URLs in total under /blog once CMS-managed news and other content is included. The starting point for volume publishing was April 8, 2026, when 11 articles went up at once.

What we built was mostly practical explainer articles on Web3, blockchain, AI, and SEO/AIO. Some of the pages driving impressions and clicks, by cumulative GSC clicks, are below.

• An article on a DID/VC adoption roadmap (60 cumulative clicks, no direct link in the original article).

The RWA guide is an example of a page where impressions are disproportionately larger than clicks would suggest, which leads into the next section on impressions rising first.

The real measurement: impressions rise before clicks

After we started publishing articles, the numbers moved in the order "impressions, then clicks." In April 2026, impressions jumped from 1,700 to 10,455, while clicks stayed at only 158. In other words, the number of times we appeared in search results grew first, and actual clicks built up afterward, trailing behind.

This is a genuinely useful thing to know in practice. If clicks don’t rise right after you publish an article but impressions are growing, we read that as a sign that search engines are starting to recognize the content’s surface area. The rise in impressions (1,296 to 32,890, about 25x) led and moved more than the rise in clicks (about 6.8x).

For reference, a rolling 28-day view sometimes shows clicks reaching into the 440s on some days, but that is a different unit of aggregation from a calendar-month total. Because comparing multiples requires matching units, this article uses calendar-month comparisons as the primary figure: 60 in February to 410 in June, about 6.8x.

The honest part: CTR fell, and what's next

Alongside the growth, there is a side effect we cannot hide. CTR fell from 4.63% in February 2026 to 1.25% in June.

We think the reason lies in the expanding denominator and where we are partway through that expansion (this is a suggestion, not something confirmed by measurement as causal). As articles increased, we started appearing in large volume at an average position of around 8th to 9th for information-seeking queries. Because the number of impressions surged at a position that is high but not first, the click rate per impression falls. If impressions grow 25x while clicks grow 6.8x, a falling CTR is simply what the arithmetic produces.

The challenge from here is turning the increased impressions into impressions that get clicked: revisiting titles and descriptions, writing copy that answers search intent more precisely, and making updates that push position up from the 8th-place range. Average position has already improved from 14.9 to 8.2, so we see the room for improvement as sitting in that band. This is our own operational read, not a universal answer.

How this experience feeds into SIGNAL

Netsujo offers Netsujo SIGNAL, a service that supports SEO/AIO improvement. Because we experienced these patterns firsthand, such as impressions rising before clicks and CTR falling partway through an expanding denominator, we can explain the same sequence of events to the companies we support.

SIGNAL does not guarantee search ranking or inclusion in AI answers. What it does is set priorities from real GA4 and Search Console data, and produce implementable deliverables such as copy, structured data, and measurement specifications.

You can start by finding out how your own site looks to search engines and generative AI. This can be checked using public information alone, with no need to share GA4 or Search Console access.