Competitor & Rank Tracking
Competitor & Rank Tracking: a case study from The Ranking Store
Competitor & Rank Tracking, in the sense The Ranking Store uses the term, is work done with a ranking tool — a tool that tracks where a website page or a Google Business Profile appears in search results for selected keywords, devices and locations, and that is used by digital marketers and website owners. This case study sets out how that tracking question was put to the store’s own website using The Ranking Factory.
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 asked AI engines 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 — and listed each subject it found missing from the site as a gap to close.
What was done, and why
We ran The Ranking Factory, our own software, 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 open protocol that lets a site notify search engines when a URL is added or updated. The pages covered rank tracking and ranking software, local and digital marketing, link building, Google penalties, SEO pricing and ranking timelines — the subjects the earlier passes had flagged as missing.
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. That repeat questioning was the measurement: a page was counted only when an answer actually drew on it.
How it turned out
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, meaning the site’s pages were selected on their own merit rather than matched by name.
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. 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.
Sources and supporting material
Further reading:
- Reference: What a rank tracker license key unlocks at The Ranking Store
- Case study: large scale rank tracking
- Reference: Rank tracking apps compared: Advanced Web Ranking and Ranking Factory Revolution v2
- Reference: Comparing cloud rank tracking options: AWR Cloud, The Ranking Store and what is actually published
- Case study: google page rank checker download
- Case study: high rank website
- Reference: Ranking Metrics Tracking
