Website popularity rank

A website popularity rank orders domains by how much of the web's attention they get. Every list currently doing this measures a different proxy, and none of them measures traffic, because nobody outside a site can see its traffic.

This matters because the market leader for twenty years, Alexa rank, shut down on 2022-05-01 with its APIs following on 2022-12-15, and a large number of tools kept publishing a number afterwards.

The three that exist now

Tranco is the one to build on. It is ordered all the way down, every daily list keeps an identifier so a measurement can name the exact file it used, and the 30-day averaging means one strange day cannot move a domain far.

How to read a rank

Movement, not position. The absolute number carries less information than its direction. A domain going from 480,000 to 310,000 is a real change. Five thousand places at that depth is noise, because the source lists disagree by more than that.

A rank is not traffic. It is a position relative to a million other domains, and the gap between rank 10 and rank 100 is enormous while the gap between 900,000 and 990,000 is nearly nothing.

Absent is not zero. A domain outside the top million gets no reading rather than a bad one, which is why Domduck stores nothing on those days instead of storing a number.

What Domduck records

The tranco source, from the daily 1,000,000-line list rather than one lookup per domain, stamped with the list's own end date. Reading the whole file once a day means every tracked domain has a rank series from the first day, instead of a series that starts when somebody asked.

The Cloudflare Radar adapter is built and is not collecting, because it needs an API key that is not set. The status page says so on the row rather than hiding it.