Authority Building
Case Study: Authority Building
Therankingstore.com is our own site, run by the same owner as The Ranking Factory, and it is not a client. The work described here was carried out on that site, for that site.
The situation
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. Those questions are answered by assistants that name their sources, so the sources an assistant returns decide who is in the conversation. The Ranking Factory had listed the rank tracking and ranking software subjects as gaps on the site: subjects the site did not yet cover, in a place where people were already asking about them.
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, a way of notifying participating search engines that a URL is new or updated (IndexNow, https://www.indexnow.org/). 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
40 of the 60 pages (67%) had been cited by at least one AI answer by Oct 21, 2026, the first 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.
Reading the record
The account above is the whole of it: the questions people were putting to AI assistants, the pages published in answer to them, and which of those pages the answers went on to cite. A reader with rank tracking or ranking software questions of their own can read the sources an assistant returns rather than take the summary on trust, and can compare those sources against what a site’s own logs show about who fetched it and when.
Sources and supporting material
Further reading:
- Reference: Backlinks & Link Building
- Case study: Backlinks & Link Building
- Reference: Entity Authority SEO
- Case study: Backlinks & Link Building
- Case study: Entity Authority SEO
- Case study: Entity Authority SEO
- Reference: Google Ranking Authority