How rankings work

RankThisSite ranks websites using the strongest available evidence for each domain. It combines a hierarchy of established rankings and calibrated estimates to cover both major websites and smaller sites that conventional lists miss.

1. Tranco for established websites. If a domain appears in the Tranco Top 1 Million, RankThisSite uses its published position. Tranco combines multiple popularity signals, including browsing, DNS, and link data. Our Top websites lists are updated daily using Tranco rankings.

2. Chrome usage and Common Crawl links. When a domain is not ranked by Tranco but has Google Chrome UX Report (CrUX) coverage, we use its popularity range and the Common Crawl website-link graph to estimate a position.

3. Common Crawl link data. When Chrome usage data are unavailable, Common Crawl's website-link relationships provide another worldwide popularity estimate.

4. Other available evidence for smaller sites. When published rankings and web-link coverage are missing, our calibrated estimators use OpenPageRank, backlinks, Google search visibility and other independently recorded website signals where available. We also look at links and Google searches. A backlink is a link to your website from another website. Websites linking here counts the other websites linking to yours, even if they link more than once. Google search keywords counts different Google searches where your site appears in the results. It does not count visitors or tell you how high the site appears in Google. We get some of these numbers from a provider called DataForSEO. We show when we checked them, even if that was earlier than today's ranking calculation. Large numbers of low-quality links do not necessarily mean more visitors.

5. Limited or inactive websites. Public sitemap and discovered-page information may support a preliminary site-specific estimate. Parked domains are treated separately from active websites. If we lack comparative evidence, we leave the worldwide rank unassigned rather than invent a midpoint.

What the number means. A RankThisSite worldwide position is a popularity ranking or estimate, not an exact visitor count. The comparison uses an estimated 305,348,459 active websites. We periodically refine the methods by checking predictions against independently observed analytics.