The first 100,000 took 61 days. The second took 26.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Yes, I still count.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
On 1 August I gave Belval a website<\/a>, eleven years to the day after I started working there. A guide to its places, its openings and what\u2019s on at the weekend. Independent, free, no ads, written in the evenings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Three months later, Google has shown ilovebelval.com<\/a> in its search results more than 225,000 times. I have watched numbers grow before: ten years of a university\u2019s LinkedIn page, from 7,117 to 110,015<\/a>. That number belonged to an institution. This one began as the list I kept wishing somebody would make.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Take the coat Sunday. On 18 October, Belval Plaza<\/a> announced on Instagram that it would open on Sunday 25 October for Mantelsonndeg, the Luxembourg shopping Sunday before All Saints\u2019 Day. From 10:00 to 18:00, with an hour of free parking.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In October, the Mantelsonndeg pages brought 122 clicks from Google. People typed \u201cmantelsonndeg 2026\u201d and \u201cdimanche des manteaux\u201d. Nobody else had put it all in one place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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<\/a>. Its pages brought 129 clicks in October. Search for Chno Matcha today and ilovebelval.com is one of the first results.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Other pages are seen thousands of times and almost never clicked. The French page for Kinepolis Belval<\/a> has appeared more than 20,000 times and is clicked about once in a hundred. People looking for a cinema go to the cinema\u2019s own site, and they should.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ordinary opening hours are the same. \u201cAction Belval horaire\u201d showed my page 108 times in October, for no clicks at all. Google answers that one itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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<\/a> drew 86 clicks, the English one 34. In Luxembourg, people search in French. I am glad I did not wait.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Something else happened that I had not planned for. Google\u2019s AI answers have shown the site about 13,000 times. A neighbourhood guide written by one person now turns up inside the machine\u2019s answers. I take it as one more reason to write only what I have checked, because whatever I get wrong, it will repeat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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<\/a> 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<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One figure I can count, and it is my favourite. Since launch, people searching for \u201cI Love Belval\u201d by name have clicked 171 times. Three months ago, nobody had a reason to type it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sometimes the finding goes further than I expected. In early October, an invitation arrived from Jay Park\u2019s world tour: a place on the guest list for I Love Belval, at the tour\u2019s 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<\/a> and I was singing songs I could not have named that evening at seven.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The posters taught me the same lesson without a single search. Seven independent caf\u00e9s 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<\/a> and at PAUL<\/a> it went directly under their own opening hours, next to the one question people ask before they walk in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At Dalmat<\/a> they hung it while I was still at the counter. At Lucullus<\/a>, Agathe pointed at it with both hands for the photo. At Corona Bar<\/a>, Nico and Justine asked for one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So thank you, Nathalie, Virginie and Houda, Agathe, Annina and Ture at Caf\u00e9 Saga<\/a>, Cookie at Golden Bean<\/a>, Michele at MyCaff\u00e9<\/a>, 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\u2019s own contact form arrived in September, about a gym that had just opened.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Posted on 1 November, three months to the day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Smile. Create. Inspire.<\/p>\n\n\n\n ilovebelval.com is an independent, bilingual (English and French) guide to Belval in Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg: its places, openings, closures and events. It launched on 1 August 2026, and in its first three months Google showed it in search results more than 225,000 times.<\/p> <\/div> I do, Aswin Lutchanah, on my own and in my own time. There are no ads and no paid placements.<\/p> <\/div> 225,303 times in search results between 1 August and 31 October 2026, with 3,655 clicks, according to Google Search Console, read on 1 November 2026.<\/p> <\/div> Timely pages nobody else had written. In October: Chno Matcha\u2019s opening (129 clicks), Mantelsonndeg at Belval Plaza (122), Open Air Belval 2027 (119) and free film screenings at Belval Plaza (75).<\/p> <\/div> No cookies. Since late October 2026 it uses a cookieless page counter on its own server that identifies nobody.<\/p> <\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\nQuestions people ask about I Love Belval<\/h2>\n\n\n\n