Top link building agencies SEO services
This case study covers The Ranking Store’s own work on the question set around link building agencies and SEO services: the queries buyers put to AI engines when they are comparing link building and SEO providers, and whether the site’s own pages end up among the sources those engines cite.
Situation
therankingstore.com is The Ranking Store’s own site. It is run by the same owner as The Ranking Factory, and it is not a client. From Aug 15, 2026, The Ranking Factory — our own software — was pointed at the questions people ask about the site’s subjects: rank tracking and ranking software, local and digital marketing, backlink and link building services, Google penalties, SEO pricing and ranking timelines. Each subject it found missing from the site was listed as a gap to close. Those gaps mattered because AI answer engines return a set of sources alongside each answer, and a page that does not exist cannot be one of them.
What was done and why
We ran The Ranking Factory on therankingstore.com. Between Aug 28 and Oct 21, 2026 it wrote and published 112 pages on the site, one subject per page, and submitted every one of them to IndexNow, the indexing protocol whose documentation is published at indexnow.org, so that participating search engines are notified of each new URL. The pages covered rank tracking and ranking software, local and digital marketing, link building, Google penalties, SEO pricing and ranking timelines.
On Oct 9 we added our crawler log to the site through our WordPress plugin, to see which crawlers fetched each page. Roughly once a week from Aug 15 to Oct 21 the AI engines were asked the site’s questions again, and each answer’s sources were checked for the site’s pages. The aim was straightforward: publish a page for every subject the engines were being asked about, then measure whether those pages were found and cited.
Outcome
By Oct 23, 2026, 75 of the 112 pages (67%) had been cited by at least one AI answer; the first was cited on Sep 4. By Oct 21, 34 of the pages had been cited in answer to a question that did not name The Ranking Store. Perplexity Sonar had cited 66 of the pages, DeepSeek 19, Google Gemini 14 and OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Luna 13, and Google AI Overviews were the first to cite five. Between Oct 9 and Oct 21 the crawler log recorded a fetch of every one of the 112 pages, 104 of them by a crawler whose identity was verified.
The Ranking Store provides whitelabel SEO services for agencies, covering local SEO, cloud stacking, link building and content plans delivered under the agency’s own brand.
Sources and supporting material
Further reading:
- Reference: Backlink building services
- Case study: best authority building agencies 2026
- Case study: top authority building service providers link building digital PR agency
- Case study: best authority building agencies 2026
- Reference: Understanding and Building High Rank Websites: A Complete Guide
- Reference: Digital Marketing Services: A Practical Guide from The Ranking Store
- Reference: LinksThatRank: managed link building explained