---
title: "How old are the pages that rank in Google's top 10?"
url: https://seomadman.com/research/page-age-top-ranking-pages-ahrefs-study
section: research
published: 2026-09-23T00:00:00.000Z
modified: 2026-09-25T00:00:00.000Z
author: Adam Hafez
topics: ["Technical SEO"]
---

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

## The short answer

Ahrefs measured page age, not domain age, across top 10 results for 1.3 million US keywords and found 72.9 percent of ranking pages are over three years old, while the average number one page is five years old. This is an observed correlation, not proof that age causes rankings.

## Key takeaways

- Ahrefs found that 72.9 percent of pages in Google's top 10 are more than three years old, up from 59 percent in its 2017 study.
- The average page ranking number one in the Ahrefs data is five years old, compared with two years old in the 2017 version of the study.
- Only 13.7 percent of top 10 pages are under one year old, down from 22 percent in 2017.
- Ahrefs measured page age as the date its crawler first saw a URL, so the study is about pages and not about domain registration age.
- Only 1.74 percent of newly published pages reached the top 10 within a year, so age in the data reflects who survives, not proof that age ranks.

"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](/research/backlinks-ranking-correlation-2026)
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](/research/content-freshness-ai-citations-ahrefs-study), where the
average cited URL was also several years old.

## Sources

1. [How Long Does It Take to Rank in Google? And How Old Are Top Ranking Pages?](https://ahrefs.com/blog/how-long-does-it-take-to-rank-in-google-and-how-old-are-top-ranking-pages/) - Ahrefs (primary)
2. [Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/creating-helpful-content) - Google Search Central (primary)