How Chess.com hit 30M+ organic clicks a month
Since the SEO work began in 2016, Chess.com grew from under 1M to more than 30M organic clicks a month — including a record 1M+ clicks in a single day. Every number was tracked and reported in SEOcrawl AI.
Organic clicks / month
30M+
from under 1M when the work began
1M+
clicks / day
125M+
impressions
60k+
top-10 keywords
Results at a glance
Years of compounding organic growth across one of the largest consumer platforms on the web — every number pulled straight from SEOcrawl AI.
30M+
Organic clicks / month
2024 · from under 1M in 2016
1M+
Clicks in a single day
Google Search · Jan 2023
125M+
Monthly impressions
Jan 2023
60k+
Keywords in Google top 10
2023 · vs under 10k in 2015
The challenge
When the collaboration began in December 2016, Chess.com — the world's #1 site to play and learn chess — was generating fewer than 1 million organic visits a month. The goal was to grow organic visibility and traffic substantially across a sprawling site with tens of thousands of URLs, dozens of sections and content in 56 languages, without losing the technical foundation underneath it.
The objective: turn a huge, fast-moving product into a compounding organic-growth machine — and measure every move so the team could prove what was working.
The approach
- Openings (/openings): full redesign of 5,000+ pages with videos, lessons, famous games and deeper, internally-linked content.
- Chess Terms (/terms): a 200+ term glossary with a systematic internal-linking programme and de-cannibalization.
- Players (/players): automated title changes and enabled 80,000+ player profiles with rich, structured bios.
- Ratings (/ratings): live rating changes, automated charts and filters by country, gender and age group.
- Classroom (/classroom): opened to logged-out users from search results with full on-page SEO.
- Events (/events): fixed metadata and duplicate URLs and shipped a dedicated events sitemap.
- International SEO: ongoing multilingual research and translation across 56 enabled languages.
Organic keywords ranking in positions #1–10 grew from under 10,000 in 2015 to more than 60,000 in 2023 — tracked in SEOcrawl AI.
The results
A few of the standout section-level wins behind the headline growth — each one a templated programme rolled out across thousands of pages.
Chess Terms
A systematic internal-linking and de-cannibalization programme turned the 200+ term glossary into a traffic engine.
+939k clicks YoY · 2.2M in 2022
Events
Cleaner metadata, de-duplicated URLs and a dedicated sitemap unlocked live-tournament demand worldwide.
+1M clicks YoY · 1.6M in 2022
International SEO
Multilingual research and translation compounded growth across 56 languages — here shown on the Spanish site alone.
+484k clicks YoY · /es
What Chess.com's CEO says
David and his team have played a pivotal role in Chess.com's SEO efforts. In the years we've worked with them we've experienced massive organic traffic growth — from 6M organic visits a month in 2019 to more than 30M a month in 2024. Honestly, I just listen to what David and his team tell me, I have our team execute it, and then our rankings and traffic grow. It's that easy!
Want to see it in action?
Book a 30-minute demo and we'll show you how SEOcrawl AI tracks growth like this on your own site.
FAQs
How much did Chess.com's organic traffic grow?
From under 1 million organic visits a month when the SEO work began in December 2016 to more than 30 million organic clicks a month by 2024 — including a record 1M+ clicks in a single day and over 125M impressions in January 2023.
What role did SEOcrawl AI play in this story?
SEOcrawl AI was the SEO intelligence platform used to track, measure and report every gain. The year-over-year comparisons, click and impression milestones and keyword growth shown here were all monitored in SEOcrawl AI's dashboards.
Which sections drove the most growth?
Large templated sections did the heavy lifting: Chess Terms (+939k clicks YoY), Events (+1M YoY) and the international pages (+484k YoY on /es alone), on top of Openings, Players, Ratings and Classroom.
How long did it take?
It's a long-term partnership that started in December 2016. Traffic compounded year over year, with the headline milestones reached across 2022–2024 as each workstream matured.
Can SEOcrawl AI handle a site this large?
Yes. Chess.com spans tens of thousands of URLs across 56 languages, and the keyword, click and impression trends behind this story were all tracked in SEOcrawl AI.