Can a site get to the first place in the search results only due to behavioral factors (without articles and links to the site)?

Question

Google

I know that Yandex-Google passes through artificial intelligence how the user clicks on the site with the mouse. And this is a type of behavioral factor that affects ...
Karoch, I have a competitor site in another city, so it has pr 0, tick 0. And the first place in the search results in his city for the search query. The site is a real-time data search application. No articles or anything...
The site doesn't even have metrics... and it's not indexed in search engines.
Roughly speaking, there are no links to the site. And here is the first place.
Zero SEO on the site.
How is this possible?
He has 10,655 queries in worldstat. request + city. Well, that's exactly the target per month.
In my city, by the key request + my city. only 500 requests.
So here's how the competitor did it. Without SEO ... and apparently, he had a little more requests (well, maybe a thousand and a half maximum) than in my city when he started.
I installed the liveinternet plugin in google chrome, this is what it says:
audience coverage 0.0293%
audience core 9%
percentage of search traffic 0.0292%
no other data, I don’t know how to make an accurate opinion about the site’s rating.

Answer 1

If the site is useful to users, provides a unique service / information, then it is not at all necessary that there are many backlinks for its successful ranking.
Regarding the articles - if you mean the content on the site, then for some groups of requests it is really possible to take the top without texts.

Answer 2

Of course, internal and external optimization is important, but behavioral factors also greatly influence the formation of search results. Try the seograph.top service - it works great with external factors, including behavioral ones.