I Love Belval, three months on: what a neighbourhood searches for

The first 100,000 took 61 days. The second took 26.

Yes, I still count.

On 1 August I gave Belval a website, eleven years to the day after I started working there. A guide to its places, its openings and what’s on at the weekend. Independent, free, no ads, written in the evenings.

Three months later, Google has shown ilovebelval.com in its search results more than 225,000 times. I have watched numbers grow before: ten years of a university’s LinkedIn page, from 7,117 to 110,015. That number belonged to an institution. This one began as the list I kept wishing somebody would make.

What I keep coming back to is not the total. It is the searches behind it, the small questions people typed before they found the site.

Take the coat Sunday. On 18 October, Belval Plaza announced on Instagram that it would open on Sunday 25 October for Mantelsonndeg, the Luxembourg shopping Sunday before All Saints’ Day. From 10:00 to 18:00, with an hour of free parking.

A detail like that lives for a few days in a story, then it is gone. So I added the Sunday hours to the pages of 69 shops, one at a time, so that anyone checking whether their shop was open would get a straight answer. Then I put everything on one page.

In October, the Mantelsonndeg pages brought 122 clicks from Google. People typed “mantelsonndeg 2026” and “dimanche des manteaux”. Nobody else had put it all in one place.

Or the matcha. For weeks, a corner unit on rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Belvaux, right next door to Belval, sat behind frosted glass while a counter slowly took shape. The name on the window, Chno, is the four elements caffeine is built from. On Friday 23 October the doors opened, and I wrote it up that afternoon. Its pages brought 129 clicks in October. Search for Chno Matcha today and ilovebelval.com is one of the first results.

Other pages are seen thousands of times and almost never clicked. The French page for Kinepolis Belval has appeared more than 20,000 times and is clicked about once in a hundred. People looking for a cinema go to the cinema’s own site, and they should.

Ordinary opening hours are the same. “Action Belval horaire” showed my page 108 times in October, for no clicks at all. Google answers that one itself.

So the pattern is plain. In a neighbourhood, the page nobody else has written is the page people find. A coat Sunday. A matcha bar on its first day. Free films in a shopping centre.

I built the site in English first. Going bilingual came sooner than I had planned, and the French pages followed. They now carry a lot of the weight: the French page for the food truck conference drew 86 clicks, the English one 34. In Luxembourg, people search in French. I am glad I did not wait.

Something else happened that I had not planned for. Google’s AI answers have shown the site about 13,000 times. A neighbourhood guide written by one person now turns up inside the machine’s answers. I take it as one more reason to write only what I have checked, because whatever I get wrong, it will repeat.

There is plenty I do not know. For its first three months the site had no analytics at all. Since this week it has a simple page counter on my own server: no cookies, nothing that identifies anyone. So every figure here comes from Google, which tells me how often the site appeared and how often someone clicked. It does not tell me how many people. Nobody who typed the address or scanned a poster is in these figures, and I like that part of it stays unmeasured.

One figure I can count, and it is my favourite. Since launch, people searching for “I Love Belval” by name have clicked 171 times. Three months ago, nobody had a reason to type it.

Sometimes the finding goes further than I expected. In early October, an invitation arrived from Jay Park’s world tour: a place on the guest list for I Love Belval, at the tour’s only Luxembourg stop, the Rockhal. Nobody had ever put this site on a guest list before. On the night, my name was not on it at the box office. The production team sorted it out in a few minutes, and three hours later it was snowing confetti inside the Rockhal and I was singing songs I could not have named that evening at seven.

The posters taught me the same lesson without a single search. Seven independent cafés and restaurants have put one up, and nobody told them where. Seven times out of seven it went where people stand and wait: by a till, on a door, in a window. At Cocottes and at PAUL it went directly under their own opening hours, next to the one question people ask before they walk in.

At Dalmat they hung it while I was still at the counter. At Lucullus, Agathe pointed at it with both hands for the photo. At Corona Bar, Nico and Justine asked for one.

So thank you, Nathalie, Virginie and Houda, Agathe, Annina and Ture at Café Saga, Cookie at Golden Bean, Michele at MyCaffé, and everyone at Dalmat. Thank you to the newsletters that passed the site on, and to everyone who sent me a tip, a photo or a correction. Many of the best pages started as a message from someone. The first tip through the site’s own contact form arrived in September, about a gym that had just opened.

Next comes December. In its last week, the question I expect most is the shortest one: is it open today? This time I want the answer waiting on the page before anyone has to ask.

And one question for you. Which place in Belval have I not written about yet? Tell me, and it may become the next page someone finds.

Posted on 1 November, three months to the day.

Smile. Create. Inspire.

Questions people ask about I Love Belval

Figures: Google Search Console, 1 August to 31 October 2026, read on 1 November. An appearance is one time the site was shown in Google’s results, not one person.