I recently published by review of the month that was at The New Leaf Journal in January 2026. I included a list of the 24 most-visited articles of January (which is my custom in the month-end review posts). In so doing, I noted that Catching 151 Pokémon in Google Search had the best-ever month for an article that did not benefit from being shared on an external site. To commemorate the achievement, I present the 15 best-ever article months at The New Leaf Journal (in terms of total page visits).
| Rank | Article | Month | Year-End Rank | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | e OS Review on Murena Teracube 2e | 08-22 | 2022 (1) | Hacker News |
| 2 | RSS as a Facebook Alternative | 03-21 | 2021 (1) | Hacker News |
| 3 | Man Uploads 2,000,000 YouTube Videos | 05-22 | 2022 (3) | Hacker News (Context) |
| 4 | Cycling Doping Fallacies | 01-24 | 2024 (1) | Browser, Hacker News |
| 5 | Lukol Search Engine Shows Up in Logs | 05-22 | 2022 (6) | Hacker News |
| 6 | Stop Saying Bob Dylan Can’t Sing | 07-21 | 2021 (5) | Expecting Rain |
| 7 | Catching 151 Pokémon in Google Search | 01-26 | TBD | |
| 8 | The Mystery of Sōseki and Tsuki ga Kirei | 03-22 | 2022 (2) | |
| 9 | The Mystery of Sōseki and Tsuki ga Kirei | 11-21 | 2021 (2) | |
| 10 | Catching 151 Pokémon in Google Search | 12-25 | 2025 (1) | |
| 11 | What is Becovi Search | 07-22 | 2022 (13) | Hacker News |
| 12 | Catching 151 Pokémon in Google Search | 09-25 | 2025 (1) | |
| 13 | Amazon “Cargo Bikes” in Brooklyn | 09-25 | 2025 (2) | |
| 14 | Cross-posting from Mastodon to Twitter | 11-22 | 2022 (8) | |
| 15 | Catching 151 Pokémon in Google Search | 11-25 | 2025 (1) |
The “Notes” column is not all-encompassing. For example, articles 1-2 and 4 also garnered significant traffic from other sources as a result of making Hacker News page one, but Hacker News was the dominant factor in their performance. I included The Browser for the fourth ranked article because I am almost certain that the initial surge of views from The Browser was what led to it making a splash on Hacker News. Regarding article 13, Amazon Cargo Bikes was (and remains) one of our best performers in Google Search, but it somewhere in the area of 70-75% of its views in September 2025 came from Reddit. That article has been shared in a few Reddit threads, but I singled out the one that I recall having been responsible for the September surge. Speaking of Reddit, The Mystery of Sōseki and Tsuki ga Kirei does gain a small amount of traffic from Reddit and other sources (Archive of Our Own being one), but its visits come primarily from organic traffic.
The list does establish that Catching 151 Pokémon in Google Search is our best performing article in organic search since The Mystery of Sōseki and Tsuki ga Kirei in 2020-2021, and it may well surpass its predecessor’s peak performance in coming months. But it is worth noting that our visitor count in 2026 is significantly better than it was in 2021 and early 2022, so one could argue The Mystery of Sōseki and Tsuki ga Kirei’s performance, all things still being fairly close to equal, was more impressive.
