Verified Confidence: medium
Primary source found; it says the same thing, the scope matches, and it is reasonably current.
Safe rephrasing
Ahrefs found that of the few new pages that reached Google's top 10 within a year, 40.82% got there within a month; 98% of new pages never did.
What the source says
40.82% of pages that ranked in the top 10 did so within 1 month .
Ahrefs — How Long Does It Take to Rank in Google? (updated study)
- Commonly cited as
- "SEO takes 6–12 months"
- True origin
- Ahrefs — How Long Does It Take to Rank in Google? (updated study)
- Type
- Stat check: A widely repeated statistic traced back to its origin.
- Year
- 2024
- Data as of
- URLs sampled September 2023
- Last checked
- Method & sample
- Ahrefs tracked random URLs from its crawler for a year; this share is among the small minority (1.74%) that reached the top 10 at all.
- Drift between quote and source
- Only among pages that ranked; 98% of new pages never reached the top 10
- Interest
- Ahrefs sells SEO software.