_{Day ??/100 do I start tracking again??}

Hey—It's Tim. 

I used to send these daily…
I dunno if you remember me.
I build Penfriend.
I have been away…

You may have seen on LinkedIn that I decided my collarbone needed to be in five pieces. Turns out that was a poor decision. Got a titanium plate, now to spend a few weeks resting at my parents in the UK and do what any normal person would do - build stuff from my parents' dining room table instead of resting.

I've been quiet for too long. Fixing that now.

Quick update on Penfriend: we've shipped a bunch of quality-of-life improvements. VIBE score fixes, UI updates, card redesigns. Nothing flashy, just making the thing better every week. That's not what this email is about though.

This email is about the rabbit hole I fell down just before Christmas. And the thing that came out the other side. And how you can do it to.

The story.

I'm building out the strategy side of Penfriend this year. Big plans. More on that soon.

I've got this keyword prioritisation process I've used for years with clients. It's genuinely sick - it's the backbone of every content strategy I've ever built. But it needed updating. The world's moved on.

So I'm updating it. And I get to the part where I map ranking position to expected click-through rate.

You know - "Position 1 gets ~33% of clicks, Position 2 gets ~18% Position 3 get ~8%..." The standard model everyone uses.

And I realise it's shit.

That's just not how search works anymore. AI Overviews are eating the top of the page. Four-ad stacks are pushing organic results below the fold. On mobile, your #1 ranking is three screens down.

The old map is wrong. So I need a new one.

The process.

I went looking for every research paper, study, and dataset I could find on SERP click-through rates. Found 80+ sources.

And pretty quickly I saw the problem. None of this data exists in one place. Every study contradicts the last. Some are from 2019 and still getting cited like gospel. Others account for ads but ignore AI Overviews. Nobody had put the whole picture together.

So I pointed a deep research process in Gemini at all of these resources and said "combine them." AI is magic sometimes. It gave me back a PDF. A unified model that accounts for ads, AI Overviews, industry vertical, device type, the lot.

Now I had the data. I needed the content.

I started a new article in Penfriend. Did my 20-minute conversation with Penny, talked through the whole thing.

The research, why it matters, what the numbers mean, the "Great Decoupling" of rankings and traffic. Chose my title. Dropped the Gemini PDF in as my research source. Let Penny write the article.

Then in the editor, I went through and made most of the edits Penny suggested. They sit in the left sidebar and map to the VIBE score, so you can see exactly which parts of the article need work and why. Tightened, cut, added my own takes.

Article done.

But I wanted something people could actually use. Not just read about. Play with.

So I spent about two hours building a calculator. I literally drew it on my tablet, gave Claude the research paper for the maths, and said "build me this as a standalone HTML app." A bit of back and forth later and we had it.

I put the whole thing live.

Within two days it was indexed. Within three, it was cited in the AI Overview.

To do this yourself - get your 3 free articles on Penfriend.

The numbers that'll make you uncomfortable.

A few highlights from what I found:

→ Position 1 on a clean SERP: 39.8% CTR. With a 4-ad stack above you: 18.9%. That's a 53% drop for the exact same ranking.

→ If an AI Overview fires and you're cited in it, your CTR actually goes up. ~70% yield. If you're not cited: 0.52%. You're invisible.

→ Mobile zero-click rate: 77.2%. Nearly 8 out of 10 searches end without a single click to a publisher.

→ Positions 6-10 are gaining clicks (+30%) because users are doom-scrolling past the ads and AI slop looking for something real.

Wild times.

Go play with it.

The calculator is free. I built it for everyone.

Plug in your position, your industry, whether you've got ads and AI Overviews on the page and see what your actual CTR looks like. Not the fantasy number. The real one.

And give me feedback. Seriously. I want to make this thing better. If I use your feedback, you'll get a shoutout and a link from the page.

Just reply to this email.

That's it. I'm back. Three emails a week now. Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday. No fluff. Just useful things.

See you tomorrow on Thursday.

✌️ Tim "do you wanna see the x-ray?" Hanson
CMO @Penfriend.ai

Same brain, different platforms: X, Threads, LinkedIn.

P.S. Good to be back and giving stuff out again.

Penfriend.ai
Made by content marketers. Used by better ones.