September 4, 2026

My Site Earns $57 a Month From Bing. Google Sends Me Two Clicks a Week.

My Site Earns $57 a Month From Bing. Google Sends Me Two Clicks a Week.

I spent months treating one of my sites as a failure. Google Search Console said 6 clicks a month. For an affiliate site, that is not a slow start. That is a corpse.

Then I looked at the payouts. It had earned $56.72 in August.

Six clicks do not produce $57. Something was sending traffic I could not see, and I had been making decisions for months based on an instrument that was only measuring one search engine.

The site

My retro hobby site. Emulator guides, BIOS setup walkthroughs, handheld device comparisons, Amazon affiliate links on the gear. 105 indexed pages. No newsletter, no social presence, no link building, no ads. I had not touched it in months.

I am not naming it. It earns in a niche nobody has bothered to compete for properly, and that is most of why it works. Every number below is real and you can run the same checks on your own site in about ten minutes.

By every Google-shaped measure it was dead. Here is what Google actually sent it over the last three months, straight from the Search Console API:

Ten clicks in a month. That is roughly two a week, and it is the number I judged the whole project on.

Where the traffic was actually coming from

Bing Webmaster Tools, same site, last six months:

3,200 clicks. 135,300 impressions.

That is about 530 clicks a month from the Bing family against roughly 6 from Google. Not a rounding difference. Bing was sending something in the region of 80 times more traffic than Google, to a site I had written off as an SEO failure.

I want to be careful about what this does and does not mean. It does not mean Bing is secretly bigger than Google. It means that for this niche, on these queries, the competition on Bing was thin enough that a small site with no authority could hold real positions, and on Google it could not. Retro emulation is a technical, enthusiast, desktop-heavy topic. That audience skews toward exactly the places Bing still serves.

What makes this worse is that I was not ignoring the site. I was watching the payouts climb. Early July was about $2. August closed at $56.72 on 384 Amazon clicks and 25 items sold. So for months I had two instruments open, one saying the site was dead and one saying it was growing, and I kept treating the dead one as the real one because it was the one I had been trained to check.

The instrument was broken, and it took four days to notice

Here is the part that cost me the most time.

Bing Webmaster Tools has a Search Performance panel. On my account it showed “check back in 48 hours” for four days straight, on every property. I nearly wrote Bing off as not working yet.

It was not warming up. It was broken. I captured the network traffic on that page and it never fires a request for performance data at all. It reads site metadata and short-circuits to a placeholder. Meanwhile Site Explorer, on the same property, in the same account, on the same day, returned the full six months of data.

The lesson generalises well beyond Bing: a tool that says “not yet” has not necessarily failed, and a screen showing nothing is not evidence that nothing is there. Before you conclude a setup did not work, go and look somewhere else in the same tool.

The uncomfortable part: the traffic is not buying traffic

This is where it stops being a fun story.

Bing gives a per-folder breakdown, and it is brutal:

The /posts/ folder is guides. RetroArch BIOS setup took 684 clicks. RetroArch cores took 601. A ROM site roundup took 438.

The /devices/ folder is the money. Product pages. Comparison pages. The pages with the affiliate links and the buying intent. Nineteen clicks in six months.

So the $57 is not coming from people searching to buy a handheld. It is coming from people who arrive for a BIOS configuration guide, read it, and click a gear link on their way past. Average commission is $2.27 an item. It is incidental revenue from informational traffic.

That matters enormously for what you do next. If I had assumed the money came from product-page demand and scaled up the product pages, I would have been building for a channel that does not exist on this site. The reader is not a shopper. The reader is someone fixing an emulator at 11pm who happens to be reminded that their handheld is old.

The theory I got wrong

My first explanation for the revenue was AI citations. The site is cited a lot. Right now, measured today:

• ChatGPT: 171 citations
• Copilot: 97
• Perplexity: 35
• Google AI Overviews: 0

303 total. That felt like the answer. Assistants recommend the site, people go and buy.

Then I checked it against a control, which is the step I would skip if I were being honest about my instincts. I had access to a comparable site. Same era, same zero authority, affiliate links present, different topic (3D printing). It has 286 AI citations, 94% of the first site’s volume.

It earns essentially nothing.

That kills the theory. If citations were the mechanism, the second site would earn something close to the first. It does not. So the citations are real, measurable, and not what is paying the bills.

Note the zero, too. All 303 citations are ChatGPT, Copilot and Perplexity. Not one Google AI Overview. Those are different surfaces with different sourcing, and being everywhere in chat assistants bought me nothing in Google’s answer box.

What I would tell you to take from this

Search Console is not a traffic report. It is a Google report. If you are judging a site on GSC alone, you are measuring one engine and calling it reality. Mine was off by roughly 80x.

Check Bing before you kill a site. It costs nothing. If your topic is technical, desktop-heavy, or skews older, the gap can be enormous. Add the site to Bing Webmaster Tools and look at Site Explorer for the six-month page-level view. The Search Performance panel shows a “check back in 48 hours” placeholder at first; that is a timer, not a failure, and I nearly wrote the tool off because of it.

Find a control before you credit a mechanism. I had a clean, plausible story about AI citations. It survived exactly as long as it took to find a second site with the same citations and no revenue. If you cannot compare against something, you do not have a finding. You have a narrative.

Look at which folder earns. Site-level totals hid the whole story here. The split between 3,200 clicks and 19 clicks is the actual strategic fact, and it is invisible until you break traffic down by section.

What I am doing about it

Continuing to add to it. Not because I have a growth plan, and not because I think this scales into something. It climbed, it looks like it is building, and I see no reason to stop.

Two honest reasons. It is some extra money. And I like to watch this space, so writing about retro handhelds is not work I have to talk myself into.

That second reason is doing more of the heavy lifting than I would have guessed. The pages earning here are the ones I wrote because I actually wanted to know the answer. A BIOS setup guide is not a keyword play. It is the thing I needed at 11pm and could not find written down properly. Those are the pages Bing sends people to, and those are the pages that pay.

And I am building for Bing now, on purpose. Not walking away from Google, but I have stopped writing for it first. The next guides get written the way the ones that pay were written: the answer I needed at 11pm, laid out properly, with the gear I actually used linked where it comes up. I check Bing Webmaster Tools before Search Console. I judge a page on Bing clicks, not Google impressions. If Google shows up later, good. It has had six months, and Bing is the engine that actually sent the readers.

All figures pulled 3 to 4 September 2026 from Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools Site Explorer, and Ahrefs. Earnings are Amazon Associates, August 2026.