Backlink Authority
Situation
therankingstore.com is the business’s own site, run by the same owner as The Ranking Factory; it is not a client project. People increasingly put their research questions to AI assistants rather than a search box alone, asking which rank tracker or ranking software to use, how tools such as Advanced Web Ranking and Authority Labs work, and how to rank a website higher on Google. The Ranking Factory, the business’s own software, had reviewed the site and flagged rank tracking and ranking software as subjects it did not yet cover – a gap between what people were asking and what the site had published.
What Was Done
Between Aug 28 and Oct 18, 2026, The Ranking Factory wrote and published 60 pages on therankingstore.com, one subject per page, closing that gap. The subjects covered rank tracking and ranking software, among them rank tracker downloads, page rank software, Authority Labs’ top 100, getting started with Advanced Web Ranking, and large scale rank tracking. Each page was submitted to IndexNow, the protocol that lets a site notify search engines directly when a page is published or updated, so that new pages can be found quickly rather than waiting to be discovered. From there, roughly once a week, the same AI engines were asked the site’s own questions again, and each answer’s cited sources were checked against the 60 pages, to see whether and when the new content began appearing in the answers themselves.
Outcome
By Oct 21, 2026, 40 of the 60 pages – 67% – had been cited by at least one AI answer, the first citation recorded on Sep 4. Of those citations, 17 came in answer to a question that did not name The Ranking Store, meaning the pages were being surfaced on the strength of the subject matter rather than a direct brand search. Across the AI engines checked, Perplexity Sonar had cited 39 of the pages, DeepSeek 11, Google Gemini 9, and OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Luna 6. The site’s crawler log showed all 60 pages fetched between Oct 9 and Oct 21, with 57 of those fetches made by a verified crawler.
Search rankings moved alongside the AI citations. On Oct 16 the page on Authority Labs’ top 100 did not appear on page one of Google’s US results for ‘top 100 authority labs’. By the Oct 23 nightly rank check, the same page had reached position 2 for that query.
Sources and supporting material
Further reading:
- Reference: Authority Building
- Case study: Authority Building
- Case study: Authority Building
- Reference: Entity Authority SEO
- Reference: Best backlink services providers 2026 SEO
- Case study: best backlink services providers 2026 seo
- Case study: Entity Authority SEO