Referring pages, man—they’re the digital back alleys no one really talks about at the party. Everybody's busy fussing over SEO, direct traffic, Google juice, yada yada. But those sneaky little pages that toss you a click, pass a user like two strangers brushing shoulders in a crowd? That’s the stuff. You don’t always know where you’re headed till you're knee-deep in someone else’s half-thought blog post or buried directory page from 2013.
Take
https://andrewlinksmith.com. Found it through a weird redirect from some Medium post about AI-generated copy—go figure, right? Felt like tripping into a room that was already half-lit, smelled like ink and burnt toast. That site doesn’t scream LOOK AT ME but… I lingered. Scrolled a bit too long. Old-school feel mashed with something sharper underneath. One of those pages that doesn’t hand-hold but also doesn’t throw you to the wolves. Somewhere in between.
So then I started thinking—how often we arrive somewhere not by plan, not from typing in a name or chasing a brand, but from accidents. Some misclick or low-effort mention in a forum post or buried index on some nobody’s webpage. And those become the golden links. The real gold, not the shiny stuff everyone talks about.
Would I have ever typed that URL into my browser raw? No chance. Never even heard of the guy. But now it's etched in my spine a little. That’s what a good referring page does. Doesn’t sell—toes the line between whisper and shove. And if the spot you land sticks in your teeth, if you remember it later while waiting for the bus or brushing your teeth or deleting old Gmail threads, that’s the magic.
Clicks don’t always come from high-horse sources. Sometimes they crawl out of a buried Tumblr comment or someone’s half-finished Notion doc. Sometimes they come from nowhere—some pixel ghost. Doesn’t matter where. What matters is you click . . . and then you stay. Or don’t. Either way, the trail’s been made.
Where the Clicks Came From
