Four numbers that tell you if your site is alive

If you built your site with a coding agent you probably never opened Search Console, and the analytics dashboard is a wall of graphs. You do not need the wall. Four numbers say whether a site is alive, and each one answers a plain question. Below is each number, with a real month on one of our own sites. The site is an online furniture shop in the UK.

How many people found me on Google?

This is the number to watch, not "rankings". A page can rank on page one and bring nobody. Google now answers the question itself in a box above the results. Clicks only count the people who actually arrived. The jump from 589 to 1,099 came from two things on this site. Titles were rewritten so the specific part is the part Google shows. A handful of pages that were reachable from menus but missing from Google's list were added to it. Neither is clever. Both are visible in this one number.

How many people came at all?

Google is one door. Sessions count all of them: search, links from other sites, people typing the address, and the newest door, visitors sent by ChatGPT, Claude or Perplexity after they asked a question. That last group is small on most sites today and worth watching separately, because it grows when your pages are the ones an assistant reads and cites. If sessions rise while Google clicks do not, some other door opened; if both rise together, as here, the site is being found more, full stop.

Does ChatGPT know I exist?

We take six questions a real customer of the site would type, such as where to find affordable modern furniture with a showroom near a given town, and ask each to ChatGPT and Gemini, once from their own memory and once with web search on. Twenty-four answers. Four named the shop; the others named large marketplaces and department stores. That is normal for a small brand and it moves slowly. What moves it is not a trick: pages that answer those exact questions in plain language, and being in Bing's list, because ChatGPT's web search reads Bing.

Is the site fast on a phone?

Most of your visitors are on a phone, and Google measures speed on a throttled one. Below 50 is slow enough to cost visits; 60 is "fine, could be better". The lab score and the real-user time can disagree: the lab runs on a slow connection on purpose, real users are on their own. When the real-user time is under 2.5 seconds you are in the green whatever the lab says. On this site the heaviest thing on the page is a product-gallery app that ships the whole catalogue as data; that is the next thing to change.

Which number should I look at first?

You do not need to watch four numbers every day. One weekly look at clicks, compared with the previous window, tells you whether anything changed. The other three explain the change: sessions say whether the change came from Google or somewhere else, the AI answers say whether assistants have started to send people, and speed says whether the site itself is in the way. Moonleap puts the four side by side on the Projects page and sends the same comparison every Monday; the agent you connected reads the same numbers and can act on them.

FAQ

Do I need to connect Google for this?

Yes, for the first two. Clicks and sessions are Google's own numbers; the read-only connection takes one consent and the property is matched to your site automatically. The AI answers and the speed score need nothing from you.

Why 28 days and not this week?

A week is too noisy for a small site: one link from a newsletter changes everything. Twenty-eight days against the twenty-eight before smooths that out and lines up with how Google reports.

What if my clicks are zero?

Then the site is not in Google's list yet, or it is and nobody searches for what it says. The first is common on a new site and fixes itself in weeks; the second is the more useful thing to know, and it is what the AI-answer questions are for.