245 impressions in 7 days. That is 6× what we had the week before. Google has now indexed roughly 80 pages, one article is sitting at position 9.5 — one nudge from page one — and we caught a Bing crawl error that was silently blocking the homepage from being indexed.
1. The numbers
Here is the GSC snapshot as of March 20, 2026 — Day 6 of the 90-day challenge:
| Metric | Value | vs Day 4 |
|---|---|---|
| 7d Impressions | 245 | +6× (was ~40) |
| 7d Clicks | 4 | first real clicks |
| Avg Position | 30.3 | — |
| Google Indexed Pages | ~80 | +46 from Day 4 |
| Bing Indexed Pages | 1 | crawl error found |
| Closest article to page 1 | pos 9.5 | /blog/how-to-verify-aeo… |
2. What is driving the impressions growth
The top page by impressions this week is /compare/brand24 with 46 impressions at an average position of 30. That puts it solidly on page 3-4 for Brand24-related queries — not yet driving clicks, but Google is clearly associating the page with that topic cluster.
The second-most-interesting page is /insights/compare-pages-competitor-brand-search-traffic at 13 impressions and position 5.9. That is nearly page one without any link building — purely from content relevance. The article explains how to use competitor brand search traffic as an SEO signal, which apparently aligns well with what people are searching.
Three separate Perplexity monitoring queries showed up in the data this week, all at positions 70–80. There was no dedicated article targeting those queries — I published one today (How to Monitor Brand Mentions in Perplexity AI) to give those queries a proper landing point.
3. The Bing crawl error
Bing Webmaster Tools showed site:citany.com returning just one result — the Terms of Service page. The homepage was listed as "Discovered but not crawled," with a crawl error blocking indexation.
The fix: I opened URL Inspection in Bing Webmaster, ran a Live URL fetch on the homepage, and requested indexing manually. The live fetch came back clean — it was a temporary crawl failure, not a structural problem. I am now going through the sitemap URL by URL and submitting each via IndexNow to force a re-crawl. It is tedious but necessary because Bing's crawler does not self-correct quickly.
The irony is not lost on me: I am building an AI monitoring tool that tracks what Bing's Copilot says about brands, and our site had zero Bing index presence for the first six days. Good reminder that even technical founders miss basic indexing hygiene.
4. The article closest to page one
The AEO verification guide is sitting at position 9.5 for "how do I test AEO changes before full implementation." That is the bottom of page one or the top of page two depending on the device. Four impressions last week, zero clicks — which is expected at that position. If it moves to position 5-7, that changes.
No action needed yet. The article is being crawled, it has structured data, and it has internal links from other posts. I will check again at Day 14 and decide whether to add more depth or build links to it.
5. AI engine mentions — still zero
The challenge win condition requires Citany to be mentioned by name in at least 3 of 8 AI engines when asked relevant category questions. As of Day 6, that number is still zero. This is expected — AI engines lag behind Google by weeks or months. They index the web, not the real-time crawl. The content has to exist, be indexed, and build enough authority before AI engines start including it in recommendations.
What I am watching: whether Perplexity starts citing any of our pages in answers about AI brand monitoring. Perplexity retrieves live web content in many of its answers, which means it can surface newer pages faster than ChatGPT or Gemini. It is the most likely first mover.
What is next
- • Continue Bing IndexNow submissions (priority: homepage, pricing, compare pages)
- • Monitor position 9.5 article — target is to get it into the top 7 by Day 14
- • Publish Perplexity monitoring article (done today)
- • First manual AI engine retest scheduled for Day 10
Follow the full challenge at citany.com/challenge. Next update at Day 10.