We rank page one for five NFL box score searches and get zero clicks. I went looking for why and found we'd been competing with ourselves.

Week 1 kicks off September 9. Four days out, I pulled our Google Search Console data for gamedai.app to see what people are typing right now, and five queries stood out because they're all the same shape: a specific team matchup plus "stats."

Straight from Search Console, 30-day window ending today. Each line reads: query, average position, impressions, clicks.

1. bengals vs pittsburgh steelers match player stats. Position 10.0, 141 impressions, 0 clicks.

2. denver broncos vs kansas city chiefs match player stats. Position 8.8, 130 impressions, 0 clicks.

3. dallas cowboys vs new york giants stats. Position 9.7, 109 impressions, 0 clicks.

4. buffalo bills vs new england patriots match player stats. Position 9.1, 97 impressions, 0 clicks.

5. carolina panthers vs tampa bay buccaneers match player stats. Position 6.1, 54 impressions, 0 clicks.

Total: 531 impressions, 0 clicks.

For comparison, sitewide over the same 30 days: 1,250 clicks, 49,703 impressions, average position 8.1. So it isn't a site that gets zero clicks everywhere. It's these five, sitting between position 6 and 10, converting nobody.

The obvious first guess is that we don't have pages for these. We do. There are 25 of them, published August 28, and they're real: ESPN's own box score labels, every player with a passing, rushing or receiving line, both teams side by side, sourced and dated. Here's the Broncos-Chiefs one so you can check rather than take my word for it: https://gamedai.app/blog/denver-broncos-vs-kansas-city-chiefs-match-player-stats?utm_source=reddit_gamedai&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=camp-signal-20260905

So the pages exist, they rank, and nobody clicks. That sent me looking at the pages themselves, and this is the part worth sharing.

We published the same game twice

Every line is two of our own URLs, both live, both returning HTTP 200, followed by the ESPN game id that both of them embed. All ten pages are under /blog/ with a -match-player-stats suffix.

1. bengals-vs-pittsburgh-steelers and cincinnati-bengals-vs-pittsburgh-steelers. Game id 401772774.

2. denver-broncos-vs-kansas-city-chiefs and kansas-city-chiefs-vs-denver-broncos. Game id 401772622.

3. green-bay-packers-vs-detroit-lions and detroit-lions-vs-green-bay-packers. Game id 401772891.

4. seahawks-vs-los-angeles-rams and los-angeles-rams-vs-seahawks. Game id 401772949.

5. carolina-panthers-vs-tampa-bay-buccaneers and tampa-bay-buccaneers-vs-carolina-panthers. Game id 401772969.

Five pairs, and I fetched all ten pages to confirm the game ids rather than guessing from the slugs. So 25 pages cover 20 games. Note which one is pair 5: Panthers-Bucs is the best-positioned query of the five at 6.1, and it's one of the duplicated ones.

Two pages about one game don't rank twice. They split whatever the page earned and let the search engine pick, which is a good way to hold position 9 forever.

One caveat, because the two lists above aren't the same five and I don't want to imply they are. Three of the five zero-click queries sit on a duplicated pair: Bengals-Steelers, Broncos-Chiefs, Panthers-Bucs. Cowboys-Giants and Bills-Patriots have no twin at all, so whatever is suppressing those two isn't duplication. And the Packers-Lions and Seahawks-Rams duplicates don't show up in this window's query data at all. So duplication explains part of the picture, not the whole of it.

The second thing, which I didn't expect

There's a page on Joe Marshall Woodworks ranking on page one for "bengals vs pittsburgh steelers match player stats." I fetched it directly because it sounded made up. It isn't. The footer sells live-edge slabs and hand-finished furniture. The page has a title that exactly matches the query, opens with a paragraph about fans wanting "context, meaning, and insights" from a rivalry game, and never states a single stat, score or player name.

I'm not going to claim it outranks us, because I measured our position and not theirs. What I can say is that a page with no numbers on it sits on page one for a numbers query, next to pages that do have the numbers.

What I actually take from this

The gap wasn't the thing I assumed it was. I went in thinking we were missing a page type and came out with a duplicate-content problem of our own making, plus a reminder that title match still carries a page a long way on long-tail queries.

Also worth flagging honestly: at position 9, expected click-through is around 1%. On 130 impressions that's about one click. Zero is low, but it isn't the disaster the raw "531 and nothing" framing suggests. The fix is position, and the duplicates are part of what's holding position down.

Full disclosure since this is our subreddit: I'm on the gamedai team. None of the numbers above come from our product. They're a direct pull from Google Search Console for gamedai.app, plus live fetches of our own pages and the woodworking one so I wasn't repeating claims I hadn't checked.

Curious how other people handle this. When you've got two URLs for the same fixture, do you 301 one into the other or just canonical it and leave both up? And does anyone deliberately write both team orders as separate pages, or is that always a mistake?