SEO Tracking Results
Situation
therankingstore.com is The Ranking Store’s own website, run by the same owner as The Ranking Factory, and in this job it was not treated as a client but as the live example. Starting August 15, 2026, The Ranking Factory began asking AI engines the kinds of questions people ask about the site’s subject areas – rank tracking and ranking software, local and digital marketing, backlink and link building services, Google penalties, and SEO pricing and ranking timelines. Each time a subject came up in those questions but was not covered anywhere on therankingstore.com, it was logged as a gap the site needed to close.
What Was Done and Why
The Ranking Factory, The Ranking Store’s own software, was run directly on therankingstore.com to close the gaps it had found. Between August 28 and October 21, 2026, it wrote and published 112 pages, one subject per page, across the areas identified: rank tracking and ranking software, local and digital marketing, link building, Google penalties, and SEO pricing and ranking timelines. Every page was submitted to IndexNow, the protocol that lets a site notify participating search engines the moment a page is published or updated, so that new pages could be found and crawled without waiting on a normal discovery cycle.
On October 9, a crawler log was added to the site through The Ranking Store’s WordPress plugin, so that it was possible to see exactly which crawlers fetched each of the 112 pages. Roughly once a week from August 15 through October 21, the same questions were put to the AI engines again, and each answer’s cited sources were checked for the site’s new pages. This gave a running picture of whether publishing the pages, and getting them indexed quickly through IndexNow, actually translated into those pages being picked up and cited.
Outcome
By October 23, 2026, 75 of the 112 pages – 67% of them – had been cited by at least one AI answer, with the first citation recorded on September 4. By October 21, 34 of those pages had been cited in answer to a question that did not even name The Ranking Store, showing the pages were being surfaced on the strength of their subject matter rather than a search for the brand itself. Across the engines checked, Perplexity Sonar had cited 66 of the pages, DeepSeek 19, Google Gemini 14, and OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Luna 13, while Google AI Overviews were the first to cite 5 of them.
The crawler log added on October 9 confirmed the mechanics behind these results: between October 9 and October 21, every one of the 112 pages was fetched at least once, and 104 of those fetches were by a crawler whose identity had been verified. Taken together, the citation checks and the crawler log showed both that the pages were being found and that they were being used as sources in AI-generated answers.
Sources and supporting material
Further reading:
- Reference: Competitor & Rank Tracking
- Case study: Competitor & Rank Tracking
- Case study: Competitor & Rank Tracking
- 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
- Reference: Ranking Metrics Tracking
