How old are the pages that rank in Google's top 10?

“Does domain age help rankings” is one of the oldest questions in SEO, and the best public data answers a slightly different one. Ahrefs measured the age of the pages that rank, not the age of the domains that host them. This write-up reports that study, published on 15 May 2025, and its method as published. SEO Madman did not run it.

What did Ahrefs measure?#

Ahrefs, in a study by Patrick Stox with data work by Xibeijia Guan, reviewed the top 10 ranking URLs for 1.3 million random US keywords. Page age meant the date its crawler first saw the URL. A second part followed 1 million random URLs crawled in September 2023 for a year, plus 2 million URLs created in October 2023, to see how quickly new pages reach the top 10. It repeats a study Ahrefs ran in 2017, which is why most figures come with a 2017 comparison.

Are top-ranking pages older?#

Yes, in this data. 72.9 percent of top 10 pages were over three years old, up from 59 percent in 2017. The average number one page was five years old, up from two. Pages under a year old made up 13.7 percent of the top 10, down from 22 percent. Ahrefs also reports a clear correlation between a page’s age and how high it ranks.

The authors add their own caveat: it may be harder for new pages to break into the top 10 than in 2017, but some of the difference could simply come from the sampled data.

How long does a new page take to rank?#

Most new pages never do. Of the 1 million URLs first seen in September 2023, only 1.74 percent reached the top 10 within a year, down from 5.7 percent in 2017; the other 98.26 percent did not. The second sample gives a less bleak figure. Counting only non-empty English pages created in October 2023, 6.11 percent reached the top 10 within a year, which Ahrefs calls possibly the fairer number to use.

Pages that do rank tend to do so quickly. Among pages that did reach the top 10, 40.82 percent got there within one month. Pages that ranked for higher-volume terms were more likely to do it in the first month, while lower-volume terms were spread more evenly. Ranking for high-volume keywords is faster now than in 2017, but Ahrefs notes that 94 percent of pages never ranked for high-volume keywords at all.

Does age cause rankings?#

The study cannot say so. Only a small share of newly published pages reached the top 10 within a year, so older pages in the top 10 may simply be the ones that had time to earn links and content depth. This site’s backlinks and rankings write-up covers the link side of that question. Treat age as a correlate, and treat a new site as slow to rank, not barred.

What should a site owner do with this?#

Set expectations by the data rather than by hope. Ahrefs’ own guidance is that after about six months, a page still outside the top 10 is worth updating, because its chances are low after that without changes. Its closing advice is to create evergreen content that can last and to plan updates for it.

An update should be a real one. Google’s helpful content guidance asks whether you are “changing the date of pages to make them seem fresh when the content has not substantially changed,” and treats that as a warning sign. The same question comes up in Ahrefs’ separate study of how old AI-cited pages are, where the average cited URL was also several years old.