AI & Ranking Tools
AI & Ranking Tools: A Case Study from The Ranking Store
therankingstore.com is The Ranking Store’s own site. It is run by the same owner as The Ranking Factory, so it is not a client. People ask AI assistants 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 had listed these rank tracking and ranking software subjects as gaps on the site.
Situation
The questions above were being put to AI assistants, not only to Google, and the answers those assistants gave cited whatever sources they chose. That made the gap a specific one to close: subjects the site had nothing on, in front of an audience that was reaching those subjects through AI answers.
What was done, and why
Between Aug 28 and Oct 18, 2026, The Ranking Factory, our own software, wrote and published 60 pages on therankingstore.com on rank tracking and ranking software, one subject per page. Among them were 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.
One subject per page keeps a page tied to a single question, which is the shape these questions take when they are put to an assistant. Because the answers being tested were AI answers, the work was checked against AI output as well as against Google. Roughly once a week the AI engines were asked the site’s questions again, and each answer’s sources were checked for these pages.
How it turned out
By Oct 21, 2026, 40 of the 60 pages (67%) had been cited by at least one AI answer. The first citation came on Sep 4. 17 of them were cited in answer to a question that did not name The Ranking Store. 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 recorded a fetch of all 60 pages between Oct 9 and Oct 21, 57 of them by a verified crawler. On Oct 23 the nightly rank check found the page on Authority Labs’ top 100 at #2 in Google’s US results for ‘top 100 authority labs’; on Oct 16 it was not on page one.
What the case shows
The check was simple to run and simple to read: ask the question, read the sources in the answer, look for the page. That produced a record of which pages were being used, by which engines, and for questions that did or did not name The Ranking Store — alongside the ordinary Google position checks that recorded the Authority Labs’ top 100 page moving into the US results.
Sources and supporting material
Further reading:
- Case study: SEO Tools & Impact
- Comparison: best website ranking sites
- Guide: b2b site ranking
- Reference: Keyword Research Tools
- Reference: How to get a website ranking in Google
- Reference: Ranking websites
- Approach article: Google Ranking Authority