therankingstore.com is The Ranking Store's own site, run by the same owner as The Ranking Factory. 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.
Link building is a subject where the wording matters. Google's own documentation states that "link spam is the practice of creating links to or from a site primarily for the purpose of manipulating search rankings" (Spam Policies for Google Web Search, Google for Developers, developers.google.com). A site that publishes link building pages and lists Backlink Factory among its software has to answer to that distinction rather than write around it.
We ran The Ranking Factory 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 pages covered rank tracking and ranking software, local and digital marketing, link building, Google penalties, SEO pricing and ranking timelines.
The point was coverage first: give each gap its own page, make it findable quickly, then watch what happens to it.
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.
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.
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.
Two things were measured here, and they are not the same thing: whether a page was fetched, and whether it was cited. The crawler log answers the first question page by page. The weekly answer checks answer the second.