UpOrbit: 6 Google clicks in September 2026, for a task manager search never found

AStart from the personIts mascot: Espeon

What problem was it built to solve?

It started because the productivity tools I tried kept failing me in the same ways. They all assumed I could hold fifteen tasks in my head, switch between them cleanly, and somehow remember why each one mattered by 3pm.

From my UpOrbit case study, published March 1, 2026.

Why UpOrbit shows one task a day

I built the tool I wished existed. Then I gave it away.

The web app works. But I kept forgetting to open it.

Also from the March 1, 2026 case study.

Hardly anyone found it through search

Google sent 26 clicks in March 2026 and 6 in September 2026, and Bing sent 9 in September 2026. Google clicks never got back to March 2026's level; September 2026 brought 23% as many. Bing sent at most 10 clicks in a month from April to September 2026.

How I measured it. Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools daily totals summed by full month, pulled 2026-10-20 and 2026-10-19. These are search clicks only. They don't count anyone who opened the app directly, so they say nothing about whether its users kept using it.

What I got wrong while building it

The tool itself is designed around the principle of picking one thing. The build process did not follow its own advice.

Three products at once

I could not decide whether UpOrbit should be a website, a Chrome extension, or a native app. So I fragmented my effort across all three instead of picking one and doing it well first.

A search bar that collected nothing

The search bar went live without actually capturing input.

Too much in the first version

The simplest version was the best version, and I should have started there.

From the March 1, 2026 case study.

Citations that pointed at the wrong paper

UpOrbit also carried a library of ADHD articles. In April 2026 I checked the site's PubMed links: 72 different studies cited across 194 pages, the articles and the app's own reference list. Of those 72, 25 linked to the wrong paper. Most were not about ADHD at all, and one was a study of penguin foraging.

I had AI draft those articles, and I skipped the step that mattered: opening every source before publishing. The errors had a pattern: real researchers, real journals and real topics, attached to ID numbers that pointed somewhere else. I replaced every bad link after confirming the right paper on PubMed, then checked the side-effect and timing figures on four medication pages against the FDA prescribing labels and corrected the ones that didn't match.

My first round of fixes made a new mistake: it put one study's ID under three other authors' names, and a second spot check caught it the same afternoon. That site has no build check for citations.

How I measured it. I counted the PubMed IDs in the site's code at the commit before the fixes began, then traced each replaced ID through the fix commits and looked every one up on PubMed. Of 25 replaced IDs, 24 were unrelated or different papers, and one was a review by the same authors in place of the trial the sentence described.

The wrong-paper ledger

25 of the 72 studies the site cited opened the wrong paper. Three of them, with receipts:

Linked the wrong paper: 25Linked the paper the page described: 47

25 of the 72 studies the site cited opened the wrong paper. Three of them, with receipts:

Linked the wrong paper	25
Linked the paper the page described	47
All cells	72

What three pages cited, what the PubMed ID opened instead, and the paper it links now. Titles as PubMed returns them, read Oct 20, 2026.

The page cited	The ID opened	It links now
Kutscheidt, K. et al. (2019). Interoception in ADHD. PLoS ONE (the app page's reference list)	Evidence of age-related improvement in the foraging efficiency of Adélie penguins. Sci Rep, 2019. PMID 30833598	Interoceptive awareness in patients with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Atten Defic Hyperact Disord, 2019.
Hoogman et al. (2017). Subcortical brain volume differences in ADHD. The Lancet Psychiatry (the ADHD brain differences article)	In vitro antibacterial activity and in vivo therapeutic effect of Sesbania grandiflora in bacterial infected silkworms. Pharm Biol, 2017. PMID 28253823	Subcortical brain volume differences in participants with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder in children and adults: a cross-sectional mega-analysis. Lancet Psychiatry, 2017.
Ioannidis et al. (2020). Caffeine and psychostimulant interactions. Neurosci Biobehav Rev (the coffee and ADHD medication article)	Xiaoyaosan regulates depression-related behaviors with physical symptoms by modulating Orexin A/OxR1 in the hypothalamus. Anat Rec (Hoboken), 2020. PMID 32175693	Ostracising caffeine from the pharmacological arsenal for attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder--was this a correct decision? A literature review. J Psychopharmacol, 2014.