The other day, an email arrived from Google: “Your site reached 13K clicks in the last 28 days.” It came from Search Console, a tool that reports how a site performs in Google Search. Thirteen thousand clicks in 28 days means people opened our site from search results about 460 times a day.
What were they reading? Curious, we looked at three months of data, from July 26 to October 25, 2026. The answer was Kids Study Lab (Japanese only), the free study site for junior high students that Digital Kodomo BASE publishes.
2,562 pages and 8,235 practice questions
We launched Kids Study Lab in May 2026. It covers math, science, English, Japanese, and social studies for grades 7 to 9, written unit by unit along the school curriculum. Here is how large it is today:
- Pages: 2,562
- Unit explanations: about 440, totaling about 2.29 million Japanese characters in the main text alone, roughly 20 paperback books
- Practice questions: 8,235, every one with an answer
- Pages on how to solve, how similar terms differ, common mistakes, and typical test questions for each unit: 1,790
- A 100-term glossary, 11 history timelines, and 355 diagrams
Every page is free, with no sign-up required.
2.34 million search impressions, about 25,000 a day
Over these three months, our site appeared in Google search results 2.34 million times, an average of about 25,000 a day. Of these, 2.13 million, more than 90%, were Kids Study Lab pages.
An impression means our page was listed in the search results. The number of times a page was actually opened (clicks) was 26,600 for the whole site, about 80% of them on Kids Study Lab.
Clicks from search were about 50 a day at the end of July. They rose sharply from late August and reached 500–600 a day in October. Late August is when the second school term begins in Japan. There is also a clear weekly pattern: more on weekdays, fewer on weekends.
How junior high students search
The most-opened pages included “Clothing, Food, and Housing Around the World” from 7th-grade geography (1,389 clicks), the timeline of all historical periods (685), and “historical kana spelling” from 7th-grade Japanese (433).
The search terms show how students look things up. The term with the most clicks was “Heike Monogatari opening.” Students combine words they learned in class, such as “arid climate clothing food housing.” Some long searches looked like test or worksheet questions typed in as they were.
Google Analytics also showed visits from Google Classroom, suggesting that teachers are sharing our pages in lessons and assignments. Looking things up and checking for themselves: our pages have become one of the places students do that.
Aiming to be Japan’s best free study site
Building on this experience, we are starting to create study pages for elementary school students. We will begin with content for 5th and 6th graders and aim to publish in December 2026.
Like the junior high pages, they will be free for anyone to read. With a computer or tablet, children can open the same pages at school or at home.
The junior high pages are not finished either. Guided by what students search for, we will keep adding what is missing and fixing what is hard to understand. For elementary and junior high students alike, we want to be the first place they open when they have a question. We aim to be Japan’s best free study site.
Please share your used textbooks and study guides
We have a request. Would you be willing to give us elementary or junior high school textbooks and study guides you no longer use?
We use them to check what is taught in each grade and in what order. We never copy their text or questions onto our site.
- Elementary school textbooks (grades 1–6, any subject)
- Junior high school textbooks (grades 7–9, any subject)
- Study guides and workbooks for elementary and junior high students
If you have any at home after your child has moved up a grade or graduated, please email us at admin@digitalkodomo.jp. You can bring them to 3-3-3 Chuo, Ota City, Tokyo (please contact us in advance) or send them by prepaid shipping.
Telling families and teachers about Kids Study Lab is also a great help.