Proof / Marketplaces & classifieds

6 marketplace cases

Six classifieds and marketplace deployments, and what each one moved.

Property and automotive marketplaces in Europe, EMEA and APAC. Each case names the platform as closely as its source allows, the channel or tool that was used, the change that was actually made, and the number that came out of it — with the baseline and the measurement window where the source recorded them.

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How it flows

Your content → what travels → your channels → what it earned

Where to start

The strongest case on this page is the six-week indexation study.

One marketplace had roughly 19% of its listing pages indexed after years of poor coverage. Six weeks after switching on real-time sitemaps, feeds of the listings that were still unindexed, and Bing IndexNow, 97% of its new listings were indexed in Google and 99% in Bing, catalogue-wide coverage had gone from 19% to 35%, and listing page traffic was up 130%. It is the only case in this set with a stated baseline, a stated window, two named search engines and five separate measurements, which is why we lead with it.

Everything on this page is a production deployment measured first-party, in the platform's own analytics and search consoles. Where the source anonymises the business we have left it anonymous and given the sector and region instead. Nothing here is a forecast, a target or a modelled projection, and no figure appears twice with two different values.

Google, Bing and IndexNow · 3 cases

Getting listings into search in the first place

A listing that search engines have not found cannot be bought. All three cases below start from a stated baseline — how much of the catalogue was actually indexed, or how long a new listing took to appear — and then move it.

19% → 35%

Share of the whole catalogue indexed, in six weeks

Written up

A marketplace that had spent years mostly invisible in search

One marketplace platform · first six weeks after deployment

Google and Bing · IndexNow · real-time sitemaps · unindexed-listing feeds

What was done. The platform had roughly 19% of its listing detail pages indexed, new listings took hours to days to surface, and crawlers kept revisiting pages they had already seen. Four things were switched on together: fresh listings pushed straight into dynamic real-time sitemaps, dedicated feeds containing only the listings that were still unindexed so crawlers were pointed at them specifically, Bing IndexNow signalling for near-instant pickup, and continuous indexation monitoring so the system could keep adjusting.

What happened. Within the first six weeks, 97% of new listings were indexed in Google and 99% in Bing. Coverage across the whole catalogue nearly doubled, from 19% to 35%. Average indexation time fell by 80%, from about five hours to about one. Listing detail page traffic rose 130% and overall organic traffic rose 34%.

Read the full six-week write-up

Google
Bing
IndexNow
Six-week window
Stated baseline

19h → 1h

Median time from upload to first Google impression

Nineteen hours down to one, from upload to first Google impression

Property classifieds platform · APAC

Google · IndexNow integration plus real-time sitemap orchestration

What was done. IndexNow was wired into the listing pipeline and sitemap generation was moved from a scheduled rebuild to real-time orchestration, so a newly uploaded property was announced to search the moment it existed rather than whenever the next crawl happened.

What happened. Median time from listing upload to first Google impression fell from 19 hours to 1 hour — a 95% reduction. Newly listed properties were outranking stale aggregator copies of the same stock within the same week.

Google
IndexNow
Real-time sitemaps
Before and after in hours

+15–20%

Organic traffic, within three months

Written up

Long-tail hub pages for a European property marketplace

One leading European property marketplace · measured over three months

Google · dynamic sitemaps, real-time submission, AI-assisted internal linking

What was done. New properties were taking 24 to 48 hours to appear in Google, and sellers were complaining that their listings were invisible. New listings were submitted for indexing automatically, sitemaps were generated dynamically for both new and updated properties, and similar listings were linked together into keyword-rich hub pages for the way people actually search — “2-bedroom apartments in Barcelona with balcony” rather than a bare category page.

What happened. Indexation lag was cut by up to 90% against the 24-to-48-hour starting point. Organic traffic rose 15–20% within three months, with the gain concentrated in long-tail queries, and seller complaints about invisible listings dropped away.

Read the long-tail SEO write-up

Google
Internal linking
Three-month window
Stated baseline

Listing leads and seller retention · 2 cases

Getting leads onto the stock nobody was looking at

Every marketplace has a long tail of listings that get almost no attention, and the sellers behind them are the ones most likely to leave. Both cases below moved demand onto that stock without taking anything away from premium inventory.

144 → 1,038

Weekly leads on long-tail listings

Weekly long-tail leads went from 144 to 1,038

Auto classifieds platform · EMEA

Curated distribution feed with a ring-fenced budget for under-performing stock

What was done. A curated feed was built specifically from under-performing inventory and given its own ring-fenced budget, so the long tail stopped competing with premium stock for the same attention and got a distribution allocation of its own.

What happened. Weekly leads on long-tail listings rose from 144 to 1,038, an increase of 621%. Premium inventory was unaffected, and total platform leads went up rather than being redistributed.

Absolute numbers
Long-tail inventory
Weekly measurement

4.2×

Lead-per-listing uplift for smaller agents

Smaller agents more than quadrupled per-listing performance

Real estate marketplace · EMEA

Rotation prioritisation into automated re-promotion

What was done. Rotation prioritisation was changed so that lower-tier listings were lifted into automated re-promotion flows, deliberately without cannibalising the placements premium agents were paying for.

What happened. Lead-per-listing for those agents improved 4.2 times. Agent net promoter score rose, and churn at the bottom of the agent base fell sharply — the part of the base that is usually hardest to keep.

Agent retention
Lower-tier listings
NPS improved

Reading the numbers

What we will and will not put a number against.

Six cases is the whole set. There are more marketplace deployments, but only these six record a channel, an action and a measured result together, so only these six are here. Two of the three search cases are written up in full and linked above, so you can read the method rather than take the headline on trust.

Where a source stated a baseline or a window we have quoted it, and where it did not we have not invented one. Two of the six cases — the 90-day social case and the six-week indexation case — state their window explicitly; the APAC indexation case states a before-and-after in real hours. Percentages measured off a base near zero are not on this page, and neither is anything drawn from investor material or from a business that was never a deployment.

Outcomes vary by source data, implementation, channel mix, cadence, market, and measurement window.

Next signal

Send us the feed and tell us what share of it is indexed today.

The fastest way to know which of these cases resembles yours is your own indexation coverage and your current time from upload to first impression. Bring those two numbers and we will work from them.

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