I don't think people are lying about that. If you're going after "best protein powder" or "best VPN in 2026," yeah, it's going to take a long time (and probably a lot of backlinks).
But there are millions of keywords out there that a brand new site can rank for with zero backlinks.
So I started pulling brand new directories every week, all between 30 and 90 days old, and checking every single one in Ahrefs to see which ones are already getting traffic. Here are a few that stood out.
A race directory, but just for Canada
racefinder.ca lists 746 running races across Canada. It's 59 days old and already gets around 600 organic visitors a month.
It's ranking #1 for things like "Montreal races" and "Vancouver half marathons." Nothing fancy, just a bunch of low competition keywords stacking up.
There are already bigger race directories out there (findarace.com gets around 200,000 visitors a month), so this is basically the same idea, niched down by geography.
They've setup a smart way to earn some affiliate revenue too, though it doesn't look like the affiliate links are setup yet.
Every runner I know is thinking about shoes before their race (I've purchased shoes just for a couple half-marathons I've ran myself). Take an 8 question quiz, get a shoe, then get sent to a real running store to get fitted. Simple and aligned with the user intent of the traffic.
A Pokémon card tracker with a subscription
cardboardalpha.com tracks prices for Pokémon, One Piece, Magic and other trading cards. It's 38 days old with zero authority, and it already gets around 500 visitors a month.
Instead of ads, it's going for a subscription:
I like the model. I'm just not sure about the intent. Most of the traffic comes from searches like "evolving skies card list price," and I'd imagine it's tough to turn someone checking a price into a paying member.
My guess is the game plan is a massive amount of traffic and a small percentage converting.
A lead gen directory that isn't even finished
petfarewellfinder.com is a directory for in home pet euthanasia and pet cremation. It's 32 days old, DR 0, and still very much being built. No data enrichment, no internal links, a handful of orphan pages.
And it's already on page one for some really solid bottom of the funnel keywords:
From what I found on Reddit, people spend around $500 on this, and a lot of that comes from add ons like paw prints and urns. Which gave me an idea: Etsy has an affiliate program and tons of sellers making custom pet memorial stuff (we got a custom pillow for our dog growing up). Low ticket, but it fits.
And a couple I wouldn't copy
visafreemap.com shows you where your passport can take you. It gets about 480 visitors a month... from 248,000 pages. I wouldn't be surprised if the next spam update hits it hard.
kitchenchecked.com lets you check restaurant health inspection records. Almost 90 days old, 140,000 pages, and only about 92 visitors a month. There's no real keyword strategy behind it.
If I owned that one, I'd be comfortable walking away at day 90 and taking what I learned into the next build.
For what it's worth, every directory I've built that ended up making money had strong signals early. Sometimes 3,000 organic visitors in the first 30 days, but more commonly somewhere around 500 to 1,000.
- Paid Partnership -
I've been a paying customer of Ahrefs for over 4 years, so it's unreal to now be working with them. I literally use them every day for keyword research, competitive research, link building and vetting directory ideas.
Incase you didn't know, they have a free account where you can do:
Competitive research (SEO Toolbar): a Chrome extension that shows you the DR of any site you're on. I pulled up The Knot while looking at wedding directories and it's a DR 91, which tells you a lot about who you'd be up against.
Backlink + keyword tracking for your sites (Site Explorer): connect your Google Search Console and see the keywords you rank for, your traffic and your backlinks.
Technical SEO Cleanups (Site Audit): finds technical SEO issues like orphan pages that you can hand over to Claude code/Codex. I take the list and get them fixed in about 15 to 30 minutes.
There's more that comes with your free account, but these 3 alone make it super worth it.
It's one of the top SEO conferences of the year. Here's what I took away from it:
AI SEO is on everyone's mind, but even people who've been doing SEO for decades don't know exactly what drives it yet.
What they do know is that listicles and brand mentions seem to have the most influence on getting cited by ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity and the rest.
A lot of brands, agencies, builders and small founders are going all in on YouTube.
Me talking to the Ahrefs machine learning engineer, DataforSEO CEO and an agency owner .
I was expecting to walk into a room of 600 complete SEO experts. There were definitely some crazy SEOs there who knew their stuff, but that simply wasn't true for everyone.
I got to meet a few of well-known marketers I've looked up to for years, a TON of builders, the ultra-friendly team behind Ahrefs and ended up talking to the CEO of DataForSEO for like 2 hours (super approachable guy).
I left with a lot of new friends and a reminder that you don't have to be an absolute expert in SEO to find some success. Failed directory or not, as long as you're getting better at the skill, I think that's the most profitable way to build in the long run.
I'm going to try to go again next year (September 9 in Austin, Texas).
