I wanted to build something different. The idea was simple, or it seemed simple to me. Show what money meant across human history. Not just numbers, but what they actually bought, who was rich, who was poor, where you would stand if you somehow appeared in a medieval village or in Manchester of 1850 with your 2026 salary.
A peasant in 14th century England earned about 4 pounds a year. A skilled craftsman maybe 10. A priest 20. The richest landowners had thousands. I wanted someone in 2026 to type their monthly income and see this. To see that they earn more in a month than a peasant family earned in their entire life. Or maybe they would see they would have been the priest, not the rich one. Things like that.
That was the project I wanted to build. Wealth Map. Rich-O-Meter. Tools that let you locate yourself in the long story of human prosperity, and it lives at realworth.io
So obviously the first thing I built was an inflation calculator.
How the calculator ate everything
You build one calculator. It generates 5,520 pages. Each one targets a search like "100 dollars in 1920" or "5000 francs in 1830." Suddenly your site is six country pages, five supporting pages, and 5,520 inflation calculator pages.
Google sees this and says: this is an inflation calculator. And Google is not wrong. Math is math. Numbers do not lie. 5,520 versus 11. The inflation calculator wins.
I tried to fight this. I made the homepage explicitly about purchasing power, about what money really means. I built Wealth Map. Then Rich-O-Meter. They are there, you can find them in the menu. Nobody uses them. Everyone goes to the inflation calculator, because that is what the entire site shouts about, on every page, in every link, in every piece of structured data.
It is like opening a small restaurant. You want to be known for your seasonal vegetable menu. But you also serve cheeseburgers, and somehow you ended up with 5,520 cheeseburgers and 6 vegetable dishes on the menu. You can put "FINE DINING" in the window. The map app says cheeseburgers.
The numbers (this is where I get honest)
5,520 pages in sitemap. 7 indexed by Google.
Seven.
In April I had about 6,500 pages indexed. Then in early May I updated the sitemap twice in one week. Then I clicked "Validate Fix" in Google Search Console before Google had finished re-evaluating, which Google treats as a failed validation. I think this is SEO equivalent of being caught lying in school. You do not get to try again right away.
The site has 200ms server response time. Mobile speed is OK. Schema markup is correct. Each page has 1,100 words of unique content. Everything technical is in order.
Indexed: 7.
What you learn building 5,520 pages
Programmatic SEO works against you if you do not have authority. A new domain with zero backlinks and 5,520 templated-looking pages looks like a doorway scheme to Google. Even if the pages are good. The signals Google needs to trust you come from outside the site. Backlinks, brand mentions, time. Mostly time.
Your pages can be objectively better than competitors and Google will still not index them. Content quality is necessary but not enough.
Sitemap is not a button you can press repeatedly. Each change resets Google's reassessment clock. Patience is not virtue here. It is requirement.
The features I wanted to build do not need 5,520 pages. They need maybe 20. They were never going to drive SEO traffic the way an inflation calculator does. They drive direct traffic, from people sharing them. Which requires audience. Which requires traffic. Which requires being indexed.
What I am doing now
I stopped pretending I am not building an inflation calculator. I am.
But I am still building everything else too.
Last week I shipped a Remittances Flow Map. It is interactive visualization of $700 billion in money that crosses borders every year as remittances. Filipino workers in Saudi Arabia sending wages home. Indian software engineers in California funding their parents' retirement. Mexican farm workers wiring money to villages they grew up in.
And this week I shipped something else. World Cup 2026 is coming, and I built a live prize money tracker. It shows how much every national team has earned so far in the tournament, and how much is still at stake. It also tracks the clubs, because FIFA pays clubs for every player they released to a national team, based on how far that player's team goes. Chelsea, Barcelona, PSG, Real Madrid, they all get money every time one of their players plays a World Cup match. This is not something most people know about. Auto-updates after every round.
Neither of these pages will help indexation. They are wrong shape for SEO. Single pages, interactive, JavaScript-heavy. Google cannot extract much from them. But they are the type of pages I wanted to build in the first place. Maybe someone shares them. Maybe a journalist writing about migration economics mentions the remittances map, or a football blog mentions the prize tracker. Or maybe nobody, and they just exist quietly, doing what I wanted RealWorth to do.
The plan from here is straightforward. Keep building visual tools that help people see global wealth and its history. Rich-O-Meter is on the site but it is basic. Wealth Map needs serious upgrade, right now it is just a small placeholder. There is a "what would your salary be in the Roman Empire" feature I keep sketching but not shipping. I want to add trade routes, historical wages by profession, mortality rates against income. Things that show where humanity actually is, financially, today and across centuries.
The inflation calculator is supposed to pay for SEO traffic. Right now it does not pay for anything, because Google indexed seven pages of it. But the structure is there. When Google decides this site is real, the calculator is what will bring in the visitors. The maps and wealth tools are why I wanted to build the site in the first place. Both can exist.
One more thing
This is the first project I ever released into public. Before this, any project I worked on, only me and my fish saw it. Releasing something publicly is strange feeling. People can see your weird ideas now. Some of them might think the ideas are stupid.
So I want to ask. If you read this and think I am doing something stupid somewhere, please tell me. I am still learning all of this. The site is at realworth.io. There is the calculator obviously. There is Remittances Map. There is small Wealth Map that needs more work. There is methodology page where I tried to be honest about what data I used. Take a look, tell me what is broken or wrong.
And if you have gone through something similar, the programmatic SEO purgatory, the vision-vs-reality conflict, the moment you realize your side project is now a different product than the one you imagined, I would like to hear about it. Tell me how you got out. Or that you did not. Both are useful.
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