I generated 8,664 SEO pages. Google indexed them. I got 9 clicks.

I run a small tech-interview-prep site. It has 8,664 individual pages, one per concept — each with a real question, what it's actually testing, a model answer and the mistake that sinks candidates. Programmatic SEO, the whole playbook. Here's what 28 days of Google Search Console says: Impressions 6,511 Clicks 9 CTR 0.14% Average position 45.9 Pages with at least one impression 1,575 of 8,664 (18%) Nine clicks. In a month. From nearly nine thousand pages. I want to walk through this honestly, because the conclusion I reached is not the one I expected, and it's not the one most posts about programmatic SEO land on. What I assumed was wrong My working theory for weeks was "Google isn't indexing them." That's the standard programmatic-SEO failure story: you publish thousands of pages, Google decides your new domain hasn't earned the crawl budget, and most of them sit in Search Console under Discovered — currently not indexed forever. And early on that was true. A few weeks ago only 6 pages had ever received an impression. It's now 1,575. Google is indexing them, steadily, without me doing anything new. The crawl budget arrived on its own schedule. The clicks did not. The actual failure mode Here's the distribution that explains everything. Across 1,206 distinct queries: Position Share of queries 1–10 12% 11–20 6% 21–50 23% 51+ 59% Median position: 58. That's page six of the search results. Nobody has ever been to page six of the search results. So the pages aren't missing from the index. They're in the index, ranked below anything a human will scroll to. Indexed and invisible are close to the same thing, and the second one is more annoying because the dashboard fills up with numbers that look like progress. 6,511 impressions is real. It's also what position 58 produces: Google shows your result to enough people that you see the impression, and none of them scroll far enough to see it. The queries are the tell These are my top queries by impressions: 11 imp pos 52.2 com