SEO Tools & Impact
Case Study: SEO Tools & Impact
This case study covers work on therankingstore.com, our own site, run by the same owner as The Ranking Factory. It is not a client engagement. It sets out what was published there between August 28 and October 18, 2026, why, and how the results were measured afterwards.
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. The Ranking Factory had listed these rank tracking and ranking software subjects as gaps on the site. There was nothing on therankingstore.com addressing them, so those questions were being answered from elsewhere. The ranking question sits alongside the tool questions: Google publishes an SEO Starter Guide: The Basics through its Search Central documentation, which is one of the places that subject is documented.
What was done and why
Between August 28 and October 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 rank tracker downloads, page rank software, Authority Labs’ top 100, getting started with Advanced Web Ranking and large scale rank tracking — and submitted each page to IndexNow. Roughly once a week the AI engines were asked the site’s questions again, and each answer’s sources were checked for these pages.
The gaps The Ranking Factory had listed were specific subjects rather than broad themes, so each was written as its own page instead of being folded into a general article. Submitting every page to IndexNow and then re-checking the answers weekly kept the measurement tied to the same questions the pages were written against.
How it turned out
By October 21, 2026, 40 of the 60 pages (67%) had been cited by at least one AI answer, the first on September 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 October 9 and October 21, 57 of them by a verified crawler. On October 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 October 16 it was not on page one.
Reading the result
The figures above are recorded as measured: citations per AI engine, crawler fetches of the published pages, and one nightly rank check on one query. The rank check is a single query on a single date, not a ranking trend, and the citation counts are answer-level observations taken from the sources listed for each answer.
References
- SEO Starter Guide: The Basics | Google Search Central | Documentation | Google for Developers — Google for Developers
Sources and supporting material
Further reading:
- Case study: AI & Ranking Tools
- Case study: AI & Ranking Tools
- Reference: Keyword Research Tools
- Reference: Link Impact Timelines
- Reference: Digital marketing tools
- Reference: How to choose a mega bundle of SEO tools for your business
- Reference: Which rank-building SEO tools to use and why
