Phantom Arcades: +92% search clicks in 68 days

Search Console property totals, not summed query rows (those undercount).

Same 68 days	Clicks	Impressions	Non-brand clicks	Non-brand impressions
Aug 13 – Oct 19, 2025	1,112	31,978	95	11,172
Aug 13 – Oct 19, 2026	2,130	52,226	314	17,366
Change	+92%	+63%	+231%	+55%

• The control: the 68 days before we started (June 6 to August 12, 2026 against 2025) were flat: clicks −6%, impressions +3%.
• Week by week: ahead of the same week last year in 9 of 10 weeks. The exception was the week of September 17 (217 against 226).
• Month by month, 2026: July 437 · August 744 · September 1,016.
• Why non-brand leads: brand searches move with press, social posts and word of mouth. A search for "custom arcade cabinet" or "Sega Naomi games" that finds Phantom is the part search work earns.

• Rebuilt the site so Google could read it. Fast static pages replaced the old WordPress site. More than 80 permanent redirects, each checked against a live target, carried the old links and rankings over.
• Built pages for what people actually search. One page per game system (up to 50 systems, thousands of games), listing the titles and the cabinets that run them. About half of non-brand impressions now land there: Sega Model 3, Naomi, Wii light-gun searches finding a builder who puts those games in a cabinet.
• Made every product page say what it is. Titles name the machine the way buyers search ("4-player arcade cabinet", "hidden arcade cabinet"). The HideAway ranks in Google's top three for "hideaway arcade" and around fifth for "hidden arcade cabinet".
• Added structured product data (price, availability, shipping by region) so search engines can show the machines as products.
• Fixed what visitors showed us without saying it. Microsoft Clarity showed half of phone visitors leaving before 15% of the homepage; the first phone screen opened on about 66 pixels of empty space above the video. Removing it put the first machine and its price on the first screen. Clarity also caught the 3D designer throwing an error when buyers switched cabinets quickly; that is fixed in the code and we are watching the error data to confirm it.

Phantom had no web analytics and no Bing account before September, so these numbers have no year-earlier comparison. They show where buyers come from and what they do.

• Bing (Webmaster Tools, September 13 to October 18): 2,399 impressions, 54 clicks. Bing also feeds the web answers in Copilot and ChatGPT.
• Google Analytics 4 (installed September 9, figures to October 19), sessions by source:

Where visits came from	Sessions
Social media	3,465
Direct (typed, bookmarks, links in messages)	2,777
Organic search	2,128
Other websites	110
AI assistants (ChatGPT, Copilot, Perplexity and similar)	106

• In the 3D configurator over the same period: 1,995 designs started, 157 full builds finished, 471 checkouts opened, 15 enquiries sent through the site's forms.

Buyers now ask ChatGPT, Google's AI Overview and Perplexity "who makes the best custom arcade machines". We measured two things: whether the answers name Phantom, and whether they send visitors.

• Visits from AI assistants (GA4, September 9 to October 19): 106 sessions. 66% were engaged, the second-best rate of any channel after email (organic social 58%, direct 30%). Average stay 137 seconds, 12 to 25 visits a week, landing on the home page, the 3D designer, the Multicade and the Phantom Evolution pages. They produced 2 of the site's key events.

AI source	Sessions	Engaged
ChatGPT	103	69
Gemini	2	0
Copilot	1	1

• Whether AI answers name Phantom (our test, October 6, fresh logged-out sessions, each question repeated because answers change run to run): Google AI Overview named Phantom on 9 of 10 buyer wordings, including "best custom arcade machine makers" and "under $3000". ChatGPT named Phantom #1 on every Florida, Tampa and Valrico question (7 of 7) and #1 or #2 on all 3 runs of "who makes the best custom arcade machines in the USA, and what do they cost", because Phantom publishes its prices. Four more models with web search (Grok, Claude, GPT mini, Gemini; 96 answers) named Phantom first for "custom arcade builders Florida" on every run, and cited phantomarcades.com 39 times, ahead of every competitor (the next: 27).
• Where AI still misses: the plain "best in the USA" question (ChatGPT 0 of 3 runs) and budget questions ("under $3000"). Our response, published October 6: a pricing-page section listing the models under $3,000 and answering those questions directly. We will re-run the same test and report it here.
• Why AI favours Phantom where it does: the site states facts an AI can quote, namely prices, where it is built and what is in each machine. Pages with real prices and specifics get cited. Pages of adjectives don't.

• Clicks lag impressions. Google shows the site far more often; the click-through rate on the main commercial phrase is still low.
• The money phrase is on page 2. The homepage ranks 11th to 18th for "custom arcade machines" and "custom arcade cabinet". Moving it to page one is mostly authority: the builders above it have far more reviews (one shows 450+) and stronger links.
• No revenue claim yet. Every Phantom machine takes 12 to 16 weeks to build, so sales from this traffic land months after the click. We report revenue when the order book shows it. Next measurement: November, in this post.

• Measure against the same dates last year, and show the period before you started. Without the control, a seasonal rise looks like your work.
• Report property totals. Summing Search Console's query table drops every rare query Google hides for privacy.
• The long tail is real demand. Nobody searching for a Sega Naomi game list is a tire-kicker.

Go deeper: the site's 3D configurator was built first; that work is in our product configurator case study. If you build something to order and need people to find you, see how we run SEO.