therankingstore.com is our own site. It is run by the same owner as The Ranking Factory and it is not a client, so every figure below describes this site alone. 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. The point of the exercise was to separate two questions that get blurred together: how long a page takes to be picked up, and whether it is actually used in an answer.
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, so we could 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.
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. 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 case study separates two checkpoints that are often reported as one. Crawling is access: the log shows whether a crawler came for a page. Citation is use: the weekly source checks show whether a page was drawn on in an answer. A site can pass the first and fail the second, and a page published on day one and a page published weeks later are not on the same clock when the timeline is read. Counting pages cited, engines that cited them, and which engine got there first gives a running record of ranking timelines and metrics rather than a single end date.