A ranking tool tracks where a website page or Google Business Profile appears in search results for selected keywords, devices, and locations, and digital marketers and website owners use it for exactly that. Checking a large number of keywords, pages and locations well is the harder problem: DemandSphere's page on Large-Scale Rank Tracking for Enterprise Teams notes that most tools "degrade at scale in predictable ways," sampling rather than checking every keyword, which is the trade-off a buyer has to weigh.
therankingstore.com is our own site, run by the same owner as The Ranking Factory, so it is not a client. People were asking 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.
Between Aug 28 and Oct 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 were rank tracker downloads, page rank software, Authority Labs' top 100, getting started with Advanced Web Ranking, and large scale rank tracking. Each page was submitted to IndexNow.
The purpose was to put a dedicated page behind each of the questions AI assistants were already being asked, so that an answer had something specific to draw on. Roughly once a week the AI engines were asked the site's questions again, and each answer's sources were checked for these pages.
By Oct 21, 2026, 40 of the 60 pages (67%) had been cited by at least one AI answer. The first citation came on Sep 4. Seventeen of the cited pages 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 Oct 9 and Oct 21, 57 of them by a verified crawler.
Google ranking moved on the same subjects. On Oct 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 Oct 16 it was not on page one.
The pages were written and published by our own software over that window, one subject per page, and every one was submitted for indexing. They were then judged two ways: whether AI answers drew on them, and whether Google ranked them. Most of the set drew at least one citation inside the period, and the Authority Labs page moved from off the first page to a high position quickly enough for the nightly check to catch it.