Cloudflare Radar rank

Cloudflare Radar ranks domains by how often they are queried through Cloudflare's public DNS resolver. It orders the top 100 exactly and puts everything below into buckets: top 200, top 500, top 1,000, and so on to the top million.

That design is the whole story for anyone below the first hundred. A domain at rank 340,000 gets "in the top 500,000" and no position, so the series cannot move except when it crosses a bucket edge. Cloudflare made the explicit land-grab for the space Alexa left, published under the title "Goodbye, Alexa. Hello, Cloudflare Radar Domain Rankings", and did not finish it.

What it is genuinely good at

The content categories. Radar publishes a category for a domain, which no free source does as well, and that is a different and useful fact from a rank. The rank is redundant against Tranco. The categories are not.

The data also comes from resolver queries, which is a different instrument from Tranco's averaged lists. Queries include machine traffic, prefetching and apps, so a domain can rank high on Radar and low on lists built from links or browser telemetry.

What Domduck records

The cloudflare_radar adapter is built and it is not collecting today. It needs an API key that is not set, so it has never returned a reading, and the status page shows it as "not running" instead of dropping the row.

When it runs it stores the rank and the categories daily, and a bucketed answer is stored as a bucket rather than converted into a number that would imply precision nobody has. The domain page leads with the Tranco rank either way, because an ordered rank can be charted and a bucket cannot.

Why it matters

Two rankings that disagree are usually measuring different things rather than one of them being wrong. Radar counts DNS queries, Tranco averages published lists, and a popular API endpoint with no human visitors shows the gap clearly.

Do not chart a bucket. A line drawn through "top 500,000" for eleven months and then "top 200,000" is a step, and it says one thing crossed one threshold on one day.