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 began asking 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.
The gaps mattered because the site's own audience researches those subjects in AI answers, not only in traditional search results. Where a page does not exist, an engine has nothing of the site's to cite, and the answer is assembled from other sources. Google's own documentation draws a related line for search: its spam policies describe spam as "techniques used to deceive users or manipulate our Search systems into featuring content prominently," and treat attempts to manipulate generative AI responses in Google Search the same way (Spam Policies for Google Web Search, Google for Developers). Publishing genuine, subject-by-subject pages is the opposite approach.
We ran The Ranking Factory, our own software, 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.
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 — so the work was measured by citations, not by publication counts.
75 of the 112 pages (67%) had been cited by at least one AI answer by Oct 23, 2026. 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, meaning the pages were reached on their subject matter rather than on brand recognition.
Perplexity Sonar had cited 66 of the pages, DeepSeek 19, Google Gemini 14 and OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Luna 13, and 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.
The same software and the same subject-by-subject method run on The Ranking Store's own site between Aug 28 and Oct 21, 2026 produced those results.