Alexa Traffic Rank Checker

The Alexa Traffic Rank is a well-known metric for comparing one website to another.

Background

Alexa is a California-based subsidiary company founded in 1996, which was then acquired by Amazon in 1999. Alexa specializes in providing commercial web traffic data by gathering various toolbars and web browser extensions. The company provided a database to create Wayback Machine and a number of other various facilities. Alexa is well known for their Alexa Rank, a metric that ranks websites in order of popularity over the past 3 months.

Rank Measurement

The Alexa rank is calculated based on the browsing behavior of Internet users. Using a combination of estimated average daily Unique Visitors and Pageviews over a course of 3 months, the site ranking is calculated. Traffic ranks are updated daily. Unique Visitors are users who visit a site on a given day. Pageviews are the total number of user URL requests for a site. The data is collected using one of 25,000 browser extensions for Google Chrome, Firefox, and Internet Explorer.

Viewing a website's Alexa Rank

Typing in the full domain name in the input box above, or the official Alexa website will show a website's Alexa Rank. The page results also reveal Bounce Rate, Daily Pageviews per Visitor, Daily Time on Site, Percentage of visits from Search, Demographics, a list of sites that link, and page speed/load times.

Rank Meaning

The general consensus is that there does appear to be a very rough, general correlation between a site's Alexa Rank and traffic. Correlations can also have many outlying data points, such as this correlation discussed. According to the Alexa website, traffic rankings of 100,000 and above should be regarded as rough estimates and that the closer a site gets to #1, the more accurate traffic rankings become.

Rank Accuracy

Many webmasters with access to reliable web analytics data often report seeing web-traffic trends and statistics that are out of line with the corresponding Alexa Rank for each site. Here are two things which may cause the discrepancies:

• Alexa is not able to gather their data from everybody since they do not have access to everyone's web browser. Although they can gather data from a subset of users via certain browser extensions, the average user may not have such browser extensions installed. This, in turn, skews the data a bit.
• Alexa simply states that the Alexa Rank is calculated using a combination of the estimated daily unique visitors and the estimated number of pageviews on the site over the past 3 months, but they are not completely transparent on how the data is collected and calculated. Alexa do not provide a formula or algorithm used to calculate the Alexa Rank.