Backlinks & Link Building
Situation
therankingstore.com is our own site. It is run by the same owner as The Ranking Factory, and it is not a client, so this work was not delivered to a customer and no third party’s results are being reported. From 15 August 2026, The Ranking Factory was used to put questions to AI engines — the questions people actually ask about the subjects the site covers: rank tracking and ranking software, local and digital marketing, backlink and link building services, Google penalties, SEO pricing and ranking timelines. Each subject the site was found to be missing was recorded as a gap to close, so there was a defined list to work from rather than a guess about what to write.
What was done, and why
Between 28 August and 21 October 2026, The Ranking Factory — our own software — was run on therankingstore.com. It wrote and published 112 pages on the site, one subject per page, covering rank tracking and ranking software, local and digital marketing, link building, Google penalties, SEO pricing and ranking timelines. Every one of those pages was submitted to IndexNow, the open indexing protocol documented at indexnow.org, so that search engines could be told about each URL as it went live rather than waiting to be discovered.
On 9 October, a crawler log was added to the site through our WordPress plugin, which made it possible to see which crawlers fetched each page instead of inferring it. Roughly once a week from 15 August to 21 October, the AI engines were asked the site’s questions again, and the sources behind each answer were checked for the site’s pages. That check is the point of the exercise: publication is easy to count, citation is the thing worth knowing.
How it turned out
By 23 October 2026, 75 of the 112 pages (67%) had been cited by at least one AI answer. The first was cited on 4 September. By 21 October, 34 of the pages had been cited in answer to a question that did not name The Ranking Store — that is, the pages were reached on the subject rather than on the brand.
Perplexity Sonar had cited 66 of the pages, DeepSeek 19, Google Gemini 14 and OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Luna 13. Google AI Overviews were the first to cite 5 of them. Between 9 October and 21 October, the crawler log recorded a fetch of every one of the 112 pages, 104 of them by a crawler whose identity was verified.
What the record shows is straightforward: a defined set of subject gaps, one page per subject, each URL pushed to IndexNow, and a weekly check of which engines were citing what. The crawler log closes the loop between publishing and being fetched.
Sources and supporting material
Further reading:
- Reference: Link Building Tactics
- Reference: Link Quality Safety
- Case study: Link Quality Safety
- Case study: Link Building Tactics
- Case study: Link Quality Safety
- Case study: Link Building Tactics
- Reference: Best authority building agencies 2026