Celorly
Goals that don't die in a spreadsheet
Follow-up to my first post here, where I had 2,074 AI citations and four clicks from Google. Two people asked good questions in the comments, so here is the next thing I measured, and the mistake I nearly built on top of.
Our best real position in Google last month was 10.3, on the query "smart goal fill in the blank template". Page one. And we had nothing to give: not one .docx, .xlsx or .pdf anywhere on the site. The page it ranked with said, in effect, print this from your browser.
My first reaction was that this is a mandate. Build the files, we are already on page one for them.
Then I counted the volume behind the position. Three impressions. The entire file-format family, every query with word, excel, pdf, printable or worksheet in it, is 24 queries and 55 impressions in a month. A great position on almost no demand.
The number that put it in place: the word "template" across all 51 queries we see it in is 660 impressions at a weighted position of 50.6. Our "examples" family is 505 impressions at 73.7. So templates are where we sit closest to page one in Google, examples are where the AI answers cite us, and those turned out to be two separate channels wanting two different formats. I had been treating them as one thing.
We built the four files anyway: Word, Excel, a PDF with real form fields, and an OKR sheet that scores itself. Not for the traffic. A file travels in a way a page does not. It gets saved, copied into a team folder, emailed to three people, printed for a meeting, and every one of those copies carries our name somewhere we will never see. Branded search for us is currently zero. Not one query with our name in it, in a full month of data. That mattered more than the 55.
They are here if useful, no email gate: https://celorly.com/knowledge/smart-goals-template
The transferable bit, which cost me two days of a plan before I caught it: a strong position with no volume behind it is a screenshot, not a channel. Check what is under the position before you build for it.
For anyone shipping downloadable assets: did they ever become a channel you could measure, or is it a brand play you accept you cannot attribute?
Hello IH. First post here, so a proper introduction with the numbers attached, including the ones that do not look good.
I build Celorly, goal-setting software for teams of five to fifty. Solo, self funded, no investors. The premise is narrow on purpose: most small teams set goals once, then never reopen the file, and every tool that fixes that assumes a company with someone whose job is planning. A twelve-person company has no such person.
Where it actually stands after two months of publishing:
37 articles and a free course. 4,854 impressions in Google last month, up from 1,201. Four clicks. Average position 72, which is page seven. Twelve sessions on the whole site in thirty days, and I am fairly sure nine of those were me. Zero paying customers. Zero registered users from outside.
So on the metric that matters, nothing is working yet, and I would rather write that down than dress it up.
Then I opened the AI Performance report in Bing Webmaster Tools, which I did not know existed until three weeks ago, and found one page of mine had been cited 2,074 times in AI answers in August. Not shown. Cited as a source inside answers. On some queries we are a third of all citations. The same page has nine impressions in Google and sits at position 48.
The uncomfortable follow-up: those 2,074 citations produced one measurable session. And that page did not mention my product's name once, anywhere in the copy. Thousands of people were reading my sentences with nothing attached to them.
I fixed the name part this week. What I cannot work out is the rest of it.
So the question I actually came here to ask: has anyone turned AI citations into anything measurable? Not impressions, not vanity counts. A signup, a session you could attribute, a single person who said they found you that way. I have a channel that clearly reaches people and produces almost nothing, and I do not know yet whether that is a distribution problem, a patience problem, or a channel that simply does not convert.
-
1
That matches what I found, though the split in my data landed somewhere I did not expect. I tested the calculator idea before building one. Keyword Planner returned no search data at all for seven of the ten phrases in that family, and the seed "goal calculator" comes back with weight loss and savings, so in this topic the demand is not there. I do have one interactive page, an OKR scoring calculator. It entered at position 31, which reads well until you see the 28 impressions behind it.
What did separate my pages was format, not interactivity. My long essay on how to write SMART goals got 941 impressions and zero citations. The examples page, same topic, 24 concrete numeric examples in eight sections, got the 2,074. The model does not seem to want the paragraph it can write itself. It wants the specific items it cannot invent.
Templates I am mid-test on. Four files went live on 4 September with the brand in the filename, in the footer of every page and in a closing block, on the theory that a file travels to places my server never reaches. First read on 1 October.
You run several of these. Have you seen citation counts move with format, and does Bing's AI report line up with what you actually see?
-
1This gap between AI citations and actual clicks is really interesting. I run several content-driven sites and I’m starting to think AI visibility needs a different content strategy from traditional SEO. If the AI can fully answer the question using a generic paragraph, there’s almost no reason for the user to click the source. I’d test content where the brand is part of the value — original data, interactive tools, templates, calculators, or something the AI can mention but can’t reproduce directly. Curious whether that changes the citation-to-visit ratio.
-
1The 2,074 citations vs one measurable session is a pretty useful signal in itself. I’d be curious whether adding the product name changes the conversion rate meaningfully, or whether the citation audience is simply low-intent regardless of how you attach the product to the answer.
-
1
I cannot separate those two yet. The name went into both pages on 3 September and I check on 1 October, a month rather than two weeks, because daily citations ranged from 1 to 460 in August and a fortnight cannot tell a real drop from noise. And what I check first is not conversion, it is whether the citations survive the change at all.
On low intent, I suspect that is the bigger half. "Give me an example of a smart goal" gets 24 examples inside the answer, so the task is finished rather than postponed. The comparison that moved me: my purchase-intent pages had 13 impressions last month and produced 1 click, while the other 4,841 impressions produced 3. So my working assumption is that this channel pays in name recognition rather than sessions, which makes the honest measure not conversion but whether anyone ever searches the name. In August, not one branded query in the whole export.
-
1That’s a useful distinction, especially the shift from sessions to branded search. I’d be interested in seeing what October shows. If you’re open to it, what’s the best email to reach you on?
-
-
1 Comment
The 55 impressions make the Google ranking mostly noise, while the file’s ability to travel is a different thesis entirely. Have you seen any evidence yet that people actually save, share, or return through the downloadable assets differently from the page?