Crit Pick, three weeks of social: 453,000 views, 71 visits

For three weeks I posted Crit Pick to social media every day, and leaned hard on one game that was trending. The posts were seen about 453,000 times. They sent 71 visits to the website. Then, in the last week of the window, Google sent 138 visits by itself, for reasons that had nothing to do with any of it.

That's the whole result in three sentences. The rest of this post is the detail, including the part I can't explain yet.

Seventeen weeks in, data through 30 September 2026 · Ghost web analytics (bot traffic removed), Google Search Console, and my scheduler's own post metrics · Crit Pick is the games site I run in the open as a live case study for SeeIndie.

What I actually did

On 10 September Crit Pick started posting to five channels: Instagram, TikTok, YouTube Shorts, X and Bluesky. Threads ran alongside through Instagram. Three weeks, every day, scheduled in batches.

Most of it was about Aniimo. It was the game everyone in my corner of the internet was talking about, it went live in the middle of my window, and I had pages ready for it. Riding a popular topic is the oldest trick in social media, and I wanted to see what it does for a small site that mostly lives off search.

The rest was the site's usual mix: RimWorld guides, Guild Wars 2 builds, Palworld, WoW Forever, demo reviews and upcoming games.

Here's where the views came from. Most pieces went out on several channels at once, so each channel counts its own views.

Bluesky doesn't report views to my scheduler, so it isn't in the total. It got nine likes in three weeks, if you're wondering.

Does social media help SEO? Not in these three weeks

Here's what those 453,000 views turned into on the website.

71 visits. For comparison, the site had 527 visits in the same three weeks once I'd taken the bot traffic out, so social was about one visit in seven.

And it faded fast. Social sent 28 visits in week one, 31 in week two and 12 in week three. Views fell the same way: about 247,000, then 158,000, then 48,000. The trend I was riding peaked early and my reach went with it.

One gap I want to flag rather than paper over: TikTok never shows up as a source in my analytics, even though TikTok was my second-biggest channel by views. Visits that come through in-app browsers often arrive with no referrer at all, so some social traffic is probably hiding in "direct". Direct visits did go up, from about 2.5 a day before the window to about 5.5 a day during it. I can't split that out, so I'm not counting it. Even if you gave all of it to social, the picture wouldn't change.

What riding Aniimo did

For Aniimo itself, it worked. Aniimo pages had 2 visits in the two weeks before the window and 264 during it. Of the 67 page visits that came in from Instagram, 38 landed on Aniimo pages.

The two most-viewed posts of the whole run were both Aniimo quick-reference posts: a list of the six free Prismana (57,000 views on TikTok) and three things to do first when you start (56,000 on Instagram). Short, useful, about a game people were opening that same day.

But look at what happened to everything else in the first two weeks, while social was at its peak:

Page visits, bot traffic removed. Page visits count per page, so they don't add up to the visit totals above.

RimWorld went down. Guild Wars 2 and Palworld didn't move. Social brought people to the thing the posts were about, and almost nobody clicked on from there into the rest of the site. A trend borrows you an audience for one topic. It doesn't lend that audience to your other pages.

Week three: Google moved, and I don't know why yet

Then the last week of the window happened.

On 24 September the site had 48 impressions. On 25 September it had 523. On 26 September it had 4,280, and it has stayed around 3,000 to 4,000 a day since. Pages with at least one impression in search results went from 143 in the first two weeks to 537 in the third.

I don't think this is social. Social was already fading by then, and in the first two weeks of posting, while it was at its peak, search impressions were lower than in the two weeks before, not higher. Nor does it look like a wave of newly indexed pages: the index count rose in early September and was flat in the latest index report I have, from 21 September. That report hasn't caught up with the jump yet, so I can't fully rule it out.

What the page-level data does show: about half the pages that appeared in search that week were new to Google, including the creature database on its new subdomain. They collected impressions and almost no clicks. Nine in ten clicks came from pages Google already knew and suddenly ranked higher.

One thing in the table could look like a social effect, so I'll deal with it: average position improved from 31 to 19 in the first two weeks. But it did that on fewer impressions, not more. My best guess is that some low-ranking pages simply stopped being shown, which lifts the average without anyone seeing the site more often. It's a guess, and I'll check it against the page-level data.

What I can tell you is the timing. Google started rolling out its September 2026 spam update on 24 September, and as I write this it's still rolling out. My jump starts the next day. That's timing, not proof. I've been here before: in the 263-articles post I had a decline sitting on top of the August spam update and couldn't separate the two. This time it's a rise, and I'm treating it exactly the same way. What Google is doing with its updates this year is covered in Google core update 2026.

What I can also tell you is where it landed:

The RimWorld animal guide had 203 impressions and zero clicks in the 28 days to 6 September, the window from my last post. In this one week it had 1,999 impressions and 36 clicks. The 413 Palworld database pages got shown a lot more too, and turned that into five clicks. The written guides took the clicks. The generated database got the impressions.

What I'd tell anyone posting on their own

Post for reach, not for traffic. On these numbers, a social post is something people look at where they already are. 453,000 views were worth 71 visits. If your goal for social is traffic to your website, measure it from day one, because the view counts will tell you a much nicer story than your analytics.

A trend works for the trend. Aniimo posts got most of the views and Aniimo pages got most of the visits. Nothing spilled over. If you ride a trend, do it because that topic is worth it to you, not because you hope it lifts the rest of your site. That goes for a game, an album, a print shop or a one-person business.

Views still count for something. A post someone sees is a contact point, even when nobody taps. Most people don't click, trust or buy the first time they run into a name. They do it after the third or fourth time. And it isn't only people who see the posts. Social is one more place where AI assistants can find a name and quote it. ChatGPT sent about 2.5 visits a day before the window and about 3.5 a day during it. I can't tell you whether social had anything to do with that either. My analytics only see the last step, a visit that arrives with a referrer. They can't see the person who scrolled past three Aniimo posts and searched for Crit Pick by name a week later. I can't measure that part on this site yet, so I'm not putting a number on it. But it's why I don't read 71 visits as "social doesn't work". I read it as "social doesn't send traffic directly", which is a different claim.

Search and social do different jobs. In three weeks, social gave me attention and Google gave me visitors. More of my thinking on what each channel is actually for is in social media for creatives.

What's next

Social posting continues, with less volume per channel and more attention on what actually gets clicked. I'll also start watching searches for Crit Pick by name in Search Console, which is the closest I can get to seeing those repeat contacts. The Search Console re-measurement continues on the dates I already named, and the next one will say whether the week-three level held once the September spam update has finished rolling out.

Common questions

Sources: Ghost web analytics for critpick.me (visits, sources, pages; traffic from China removed as bot traffic), 27 August to 30 September 2026, read 1 October 2026; Google Search Console for critpick.me (clicks, impressions, average position, pages, index report), same window; post counts and views from the Crit Pick social scheduler, read 1 October 2026; the Google Search Status Dashboard for the September 2026 spam update.