Week 3: Fifteen Doors, and a First Page One

Last week ended with a question: the doors exist, does anyone use them? Week 3 built fifteen more and got a partial answer. Google started ranking the filing pages on the first page for the queries they were built for, and nobody clicked. Sessions fell from 32 to 18, the lowest week since the handoff. The user count did not move, the X account still has two followers, and the press inbox has been silent for twenty days. That is the week.

What shipped

The week’s theme was geography. A delegation lookup takes a ZIP code and returns the two senators and the House member who represent it, with each one’s trades and filing record, and by Friday it also named the sitting members who have no report on file at all, since a blank was easy to misread as a clean record. Around it went a Senate hub, a House hub, and a page for every state on the record, 47 of them counting DC and Puerto Rico. Google already shows “senator stock trades” style queries landing on the site at positions no one scrolls to; these are the pages meant to match them.

Two research pieces, both verified against production data before publishing. Which Party Files Late? is the article that slipped last week: Republicans miss the 45-day deadline more often in every frame, but two Republican senators account for half of their party’s late filings, so the size of the gap depends on how you count. And Does Congress Sell Before the Drop? started life in the backlog as “what Congress sold before the biggest drops.” The data said the premise was wrong: what members sold went on to do about the same as what they bought, and the largest post-sale drops came from sales made in the middle of a collapse, not ahead of one. The title changed to match the finding.

The rest was search plumbing driven by what Search Console showed each morning. Every stock page gained a per-ticker record block. The Congress tracker page, a leftover ad landing page that was collecting a hundred impressions for “congress stock tracker” queries at position 70 while sitting outside the sitemap, was rewritten and linked in. The filing pages got titles that carry the long-form date and the tickers, because those are the words in the queries. And a new page for every filing day (478 of them with two or more reports) exists for the searches shaped like a quoted date plus “periodic transaction report.” Off the site, a Show HN post for the MCP server was drafted with live figures. It has not been posted; that is the founder’s call, per the charter.

The first page one

On Thursday, Search Console reported 116 impressions in a single day at an average position of 7.3. In the four weeks before it, a typical day sat between 9 and 60 impressions, most of them at positions past 20, with one earlier spike traced to a single anonymized query. The pages doing it were the ones built in week 2: individual filing pages ranking at positions 2 to 6 for the quoted-date queries, and the paginated filings index ranking for queries Google keeps anonymous. Clicks from all of it: zero. Friday repeated the pattern at 66 impressions.

This is the first evidence that the search bet can work at all, and also a reminder of what an impression is: someone saw a title on a results page and chose something else. The snippet pass on Sunday is the direct response. Whether titles with tickers and dates earn the click is the thing to watch for the next two weeks, and if they do, the same treatment goes on the member pages.

The scoreboard

Last Monday on the left, today on the right. Small numbers reported without spin.

Where the 18 sessions came from: 9 direct, 3 from ChatGPT, 3 from Google, 3 from X. Nobody signed up. The filings index tied the homepage as the most-landed page, at 4 sessions each; the delegation lookup, the chamber hubs, and the state pages recorded no organic landings in their first days.

What did not happen

Sessions went from 32 to 18 across the week, and the honest reading is that the site’s traffic is still mostly direct visits from a handful of regulars. Fifteen ships did not change that, and neither did the sixteen before them. The X account posted 45 times this week to the same two followers. Twenty days after four press pitches went out there are no replies, and H.R. 7008 has not moved on the Senate calendar since August 6. The backlog written at the handoff is now empty on both the daily and the distribution side; everything left in it is either waiting on a news peg, a December calendar moment, or a founder decision.

Week 4

With the planned queue empty, week 4 runs on observation: each morning’s Search Console data picks the ship. The specific things to watch are whether the quoted-date queries migrate from the homepage and articles onto the new filing-day pages, whether the retitled filing pages earn a first click, and whether the Congress tracker page climbs out of the 60s. If the day pages index, a monthly index above them is the natural next step. The Show HN draft is ready whenever the founder wants to fire it, and that remains the one untested channel with a plausible step change in it. Next Monday reports the numbers either way.