Rank Tracker

The Rank Tracker, found in the main menu under Intelligence → Rank Tracker, lists every client of your workspace; open a client to see its keywords. It records where the client's site stands for the keywords you choose: in Google and Bing, on desktop and on mobile, from a country, a city or a postcode, and in Google's local results. Competitors are read from the same results, so you see who stands above the client without paying for a second search. Every position is one real search, made from one place at one moment, and kept with the results list it was read from. That is the difference to a number on its own: you can open any position and see the list behind it. The searches run on your own DataForSEO account. CrunchJunkie adds nothing to their price and sets no keyword limit.

The Rank Tracker uses DataForSEO, a search-results provider, and you bring your own account. Create one at dataforseo.com, add credit, and open API Access in its dashboard. You need two values from there: the API login and the API password. The API password is not the password you sign in with. Open Settings → Rank Tracker and enter both. CrunchJunkie checks them against DataForSEO before saving, stores them encrypted and never shows the password again. One account serves every client of your workspace. Any member can connect it; only admins and owners can remove it. Removing it stops the checks and keeps your keywords and history. If the account has an IP whitelist switched on, DataForSEO refuses our requests. Switch the whitelist off under API Access, then connect again.

Choose Add keywords and enter one keyword per line; up to 2,000 at a time. A line with a search operator such as site: cannot be tracked, a line entered twice is taken once, and the dialog tells you which lines it left out and why. If the client's Search Console is connected, Show searches lists the searches the site was shown for in the last 28 days that you do not track yet, with at least 10 impressions, the largest first. The position beside them is Search Console's average over all places, devices and days. It is there to help you choose, and it is not the position the tracker will measure. Then choose the place the search is made from, the language, and where to search: Google desktop, Google mobile, Bing desktop, Bing mobile, Google's local list and Google Maps. For Google and Bing you choose how many results to ask for: the top 20, 30, 50 or 100 (Bing: at most 50). Optionally name the page you want to rank for these keywords, and add tags to group them. Tags given in the dialog apply to every keyword of the entry; to tag a single keyword, put its tags after a vertical bar on its line (dentist auckland | Local, Core), or paste two columns from a spreadsheet. Later, select keywords in the table and choose Tag to add or remove tags. The dialog shows what the choice costs per month before you save it.

A place can be a country, a region, a city, a district or a postcode from DataForSEO's list, or coordinates typed as latitude, longitude. The list does not hold every postcode of every country; where one is missing, use the city or coordinates. Google is searched on the country's own domain (google.co.nz for New Zealand, google.de for Germany) from the place you chose. Bing can only be pointed at a country or a region. For a keyword with a city or postcode, Bing is searched for the whole country, and every such position carries the note "Whole country". We say so instead of presenting a national Bing position as a local one.

Each row is a keyword, each column a results list. The large number is the position among organic results. The small number beside it is the place among everything on the page, counting ads, the local pack and answer boxes; it tells you how far down the page the result really sits. Below the position is the change since the previous check. "New" means the site was not in the results before and is now; "Left" means the opposite. A keyword that is not found reads "Not in the 37 results", with the number of results the search engine actually returned, because that is what the search was measured against. Other states are named, never left blank: "Off" means the list is not switched on for this keyword, "Not checked yet" that no run has reached it, and "Search failed" that the search engine gave no usable answer. A failed search shows the last position that was measured, marked as last known. The tiles above the table count keywords: how many were checked, how many stand in the top 3 and the top 10, and how many moved. Each count names what it was counted over. The average position is calculated over the keywords that rank and says how many those are.

By default a position is compared with the check before it. Under "Changes measured against" you can choose 7, 28 or 90 days earlier instead. The tracker then takes the newest check that is at least that many whole days older. A keyword with no check that old is not compared; a younger check is never used in its place. Hover a change to see the date it is measured against. Under the tiles for the top 3 and the top 10 you see how many keywords entered and how many left that range between the two checks. Click a number to list them. Outside the range includes "not found". Two checks that came back as different forms of results page are not compared, so they are never counted as a crossing. When you filter by a tag or by a search text, the tiles, the chart and the views beside the table count the keywords you narrowed to, and a line above the tiles says how many of how many. A view such as Top 10 or Moved does not narrow the tiles.

Beside the keyword table there are three more views. None of them sends a search; they read what is already stored and cost nothing. Pages lists the pages of the site that rank, with how many keywords each ranks for, how many of those are in the top 3 and top 10, and the average position over that page's keywords. Below it are the keywords on which pages take turns: every time the site's first result was a different page than at the ranked check before it, with the date and both positions. Where two pages go back and forth, they compete for the same search. Found in the results counts the domains in the first ten organic results of your keywords, at the newest check of each: for how many keywords a domain is there, how often it is in the top 3, and for how many it stands ahead of the client's own site. Domains you already track are marked. Choose Track to add one as a competitor; its positions are then read from the results lists that are still stored in full, so the comparison does not start empty. A domain that appears often is not necessarily a competitor: directories and publishers rank for many searches. By tag shows the same figures as the tiles for every tag. A keyword with two tags is counted under both, so the rows do not add up to the total.

The column "Searches a month" shows Google Keyword Planner's average monthly searches for the keyword. It is the figure for the whole country of the keyword's place, not for the city, and for the keyword's language where Keyword Planner knows it. Google rounds the figure, so it is shown as a range such as 100 to 1,000. "Under 10" means Google reports fewer than ten searches or none. The figure says how often a keyword is searched. It does not say how many visits a position brings, and the Rank Tracker does not estimate traffic from it. Looking it up costs nothing, is not charged to your DataForSEO account, and is refreshed every 30 days. It is available for 27 countries; elsewhere the column shows a dash.

Three reasons, all of them normal. A search is answered for one place, one device and one moment. Your own browser adds your location, your sign-in and your history. Open the same search from the evidence panel and you will often see a different order. Google answers the same search in two forms: a short results page of a few dozen results and a long one of close to a hundred. The two rank differently. In our tests one site stood 5th in the short form and 24th in the long one, within two hours. The tracker stores how many results each check returned, and when two checks came from different forms it shows both positions and does not call the difference a change. Such keywords appear under Needs attention. Search engines return fewer results than asked for. Asking for the top 100 does not mean 100 results came back.

Google shows local businesses in three places, and they do not rank the same: the local pack of three inside the results page, the longer list that opens behind it, and Google Maps. The Rank Tracker reads all three and names the list with every position. The local pack is read from the normal Google search at no extra cost; the local list and Google Maps are searches of their own. A business is recognised by its Google business id. You do not have to know the number: under Set-up and cost, paste the address of the business from Google Maps (open the listing, copy the address from the browser's address bar) and the id is read from it. After the first local check the id is also filled in by itself when exactly one listing links to the site. Without it, a listing is recognised by the website it links to, and a listing without a website cannot be recognised. A business is never matched by its name.

When Google shows an AI Overview for a keyword, the table says so and says whether the client's site is among its sources: "cited", "not cited", or "sources not read" when Google delivered the overview without its source list. The share of citations is counted over the overviews whose sources could be read. This is one search per week from one place. For how AI engines answer across prompts, engines and repeated runs, use AI Visibility; the two measure different things and are not added together.

Click any position. The panel shows when the search ran, on which domain, how many results came back on how many pages, what the check cost, every tracked domain's position in that search, the history of the keyword, and the results list itself with the tracked domains highlighted. A link repeats the same search in your browser. Results lists are kept in full for eight weeks. After that a list is shortened to the top ten results and the rows of your tracked domains. Positions are kept without a time limit.

Rankings are checked once a week, on the weekday and hour you set for each client under Set-up and cost, in the client's own timezone. The weekly run uses DataForSEO's standard queue, whose results normally arrive within the hour. Refresh now checks all keywords, or the ones you selected, straight away. It uses the high-priority queue, which answers in about a minute and costs twice as much per page. The dialog shows the most it can cost, and nothing is spent until you confirm.

DataForSEO charges your account in US dollars per page of results: USD 0.0006 per page on the standard queue and USD 0.0012 on the high-priority queue. A page holds ten organic results, so asking Google for the top 100 costs at most USD 0.006 per keyword, device and week. The local list and Google Maps cost one to two pages per check. You are charged for the pages a search engine returns, which is often fewer than you asked for, so the real cost usually lies below the maximum. Every amount CrunchJunkie shows before a run is that maximum and is labelled "up to". What was really charged is shown under Set-up and cost, for the last 28 days. A search that fails on the search engine's side can still be billed by DataForSEO. A failed search is tried again at most twice. Competitors cost nothing extra. A check reads every tracked domain from the same results list.

The client's own site is taken from the website in the client's settings. Under Set-up and cost, add up to ten competitor domains per client; you can paste a full link, only the domain is kept. "Compare with competitors" in the table shows their positions beside the client's for the chosen results list, and marks a competitor that stands above the client. A competitor added today appears in checks from today on. Older results lists that were already shortened hold the competitor only where it stood in the top ten.

Rank Tracking is a data source in the report builder for every client that tracks keywords; it needs no further connection. Its widgets show the keywords checked and how many stand in the top 3, 10 and 20, the average position, keywords in the top results per weekly run, positions by bucket, a table of keyword positions, the biggest movers, and a comparison with competitors. Numbers in reports are counts of keywords and name their base ("of 24 keywords"). A metric without a prefix is about the client's main results list, normally Google desktop; "Bing desktop: Top 10" names its list. For the report's period, each keyword counts with its last check inside the period. The average position is shown as a figure and is not charted.

The connector gives an assistant ten ranking tools. Four read: get_rank_tracking_setup, find_rank_location, get_rankings and get_ranking_evidence. Five change the set-up and show a preview before anything is saved: add_rank_keywords, update_rank_keywords, remove_rank_keywords, manage_rank_competitors and set_rank_schedule. One spends on your DataForSEO account: refresh_rankings. It needs the switch "Allow actions that spend AI" under Settings → Connect AI assistants (MCP), shows the most it can cost, and runs only after you confirm.

What the Rank Tracker does not do today: daily checks (the schedule is weekly, with manual refresh in between), search engines other than Google and Bing, keyword search volumes, and Bing positions for a city or postcode. It reports positions in search results; it does not measure clicks or traffic, which Search Console and Google Analytics report.