Alexa Rank Extension
Hennie Jaffe
Alexa was founded as an independent company in 1996 and acquired by Amazon in 1999 for $250 million in stock.[3] Alexa provided web traffic data, global rankings, and other information on over 30 million websites.[4] Alexa estimated website traffic based on a sample of millions of Internet users using browser extensions as well as from sites that had chosen to install an Alexa script.[5] As of 2020, its website was visited by over 400 million people every month.[citation needed]
Alexa Internet was founded in April 1996 by Brewster Kahle and Bruce Gilliat.[8] The company's name was chosen in homage to the Library of Alexandria in Ptolemaic Egypt, drawing a parallel between the largest repository of knowledge in the ancient world and the potential of the Internet to become a similar store of knowledge.[9] Alexa initially offered a toolbar that gave Internet users suggestions on where to go next based on the traffic patterns of its user community. The company also offered context for each site visited: to whom it was registered, how many pages it had, how many other sites pointed to it, and how frequently it was updated.[10]
Alexa's operations grew to include the archiving of web pages as they are "crawled" and examined by an automated computer program (nicknamed a "bot" or "web crawler").[11][12] This database served as the basis for the creation of the Internet Archive, accessible through the Wayback Machine.[13] In 1998, the company donated a copy of the archive, two terabytes in size, to the Library of Congress.[9] Alexa continued to supply the Internet Archive with web crawls. In 1999, as the company moved away from its original vision of providing an "intelligent" search engine, Alexa was acquired by Amazon.com for approximately US$250 million in Amazon stock.[14]
Alexa began a partnership with Google in early 2002 and with the web directory DMOZ in January 2003.[15] In December 2005, Alexa opened its extensive search index and Web-crawling facilities to third-party programs through a comprehensive set of Web services and APIs. These could be used, for instance, to construct vertical search engines that could run on Alexa's servers or elsewhere. In May 2006, Google was replaced by Windows Live Search as a provider of search results.[16] In December 2006, Amazon released Alexa Image Search. Built in-house, it was the first major application built on the company's Web platform. In May 2007, Alexa changed their API to limit comparisons to three websites, reduce the size of embedded graphs in Flash, and add mandatory embedded BritePic advertisements.
In April 2007, the company filed a lawsuit, Alexa v. Hornbaker, to stop trademark infringement by the Statsaholic service.[17] In the lawsuit, Alexa alleged that Ron Hornbaker was stealing traffic graphs for profit and that the primary purpose of his site was to display graphs that were generated by Alexa's servers.[18] Hornbaker had removed the term Alexa from his service name on March 19, 2007.[19] On November 27, 2008, Amazon announced that Alexa Web Search was no longer accepting new customers and that the service would be deprecated or discontinued for existing customers on January 26, 2009.[20] Thereafter, Alexa became a purely analytics-focused company.
On March 31, 2009, Alexa revealed a major website redesign. The redesigned site provided new web traffic metrics, including average page views per individual user, bounce rate (the rate of users who come to and then leave a webpage), and user time on the website.[21] In the following weeks, Alexa added more features, including visitor demographics, clickstream, and web search traffic statistics.[22]
During this period, Alexa's algorithm had been evolving along with it. Statistics projection and the use of their technology associated with a large network of certificated websites allowed them to keep ahead of the website traffic metrics around the world. Because of this, many large sites were using it as the main reference for popularity on the internet.
On December 8, 2021, Amazon announced the cessation of its website ranking and competitive analysis service, which has been available to the public for more than 25 years. From that day on, it was no longer possible to create accounts or buy subscriptions on the service. The statement first published on its website specifies the total cessation of the service as of May 1, 2022. Existing subscriptions would be available until May 1, 2022, UTC, after which everything on the site would be removed and replaced with an "End of Service Notice".[6][7][24]
A key metric published from Alexa Internet analytics was the Alexa Traffic Rank, also simply known as Alexa Rank. It was also referred to as Global Rank by Alexa Internet and was designed to be an estimate of a website's popularity. As of May 2018[update], Alexa Internet's tooltip for Global Rank said the rank is calculated from a combination of daily visitors and page views on a website over a three-month period.[25]
The traffic rank used to be determined from data recollected from users that had the Alexa toolbar installed on their browser. As of 2020, Alexa did not use a toolbar; instead, it used data from users that had installed any of a number of browser extensions and from websites that had the Alexa script installed on their webpages.[27][28]
Alexa replaced their toolbar with browser extensions. These extensions were made available for Google Chrome and Firefox browsers. The Alexa browser extension displayed the Alexa Traffic Rank for websites, showed related websites, provided search analytics, and quickly allowed users to view the Internet Archive through the Wayback Machine.[29] They were last updated in May 2020, two years prior to the service's closure.
Until 2007, a third-party-supplied Mozilla plug-in called Search Status for the Firefox browser[35] served as the only option for Firefox users after Amazon abandoned its A9 toolbar.[36] On July 16, 2007, Alexa released an official toolbar for Firefox called Sparky.[37] On 16 April 2008, many users reported drastic shifts in their Alexa rankings. Alexa confirmed this later in the day with an announcement that they had released an updated ranking system, claiming that they would now take into account more sources of data "beyond Alexa Toolbar users".[38][39]
Decades ago, a company was founded, named after the library of Alexandria. This company, Alexa Internet, started life as a content recommendation engine. They watched user browsing habits and, through a toolbar, offered suggestions and recommendations for users where they should check out next. Back in 1996, in the internet Wild West days, this sort of thing was exciting and charming.
While offering these suggestions, Alexa also harvested information about them to provide to the user to keep you informed. This information included who had registered the site, how many pages it had, how many backlinks it had, and how often the owner kept it up to date.
In 1999, Amazon bought Alexa.com and built it into an analytics powerhouse. They worked directly with Google, DMOZ, the Internet Archive, and a variety of other analytics providers. They also offered a global ranking of websites based on website traffic numbers. The "Alexa Rank" wasn't that useful, but it was interesting to monitor.
As with any large service owned by one of today's modern megacorps, Alexa has changed a lot over the years. Eventually, their search engine closed down, and they reduced their archive. In 2009 or thereabouts, Amazon announced that Alexa would be focused entirely on analytics moving forward.
And what an analytics platform it was! Alexa provided some excellent data, and their API powers many different tools and apps throughout the internet. It's all the more devastating, then, that in December of 2021, Amazon announced that Alexa would be shuttering operations.
Alexa Internet was a leading analytics company that collected data on user browsing habits and site statistics. The enterprise has since gifted an archive to the Library of Congress, forming the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. After Amazon's acquisition, Alexa ascended as an analytics giant, its API powering numerous web tools. However, in December 2021, Amazon revealed that Alexa would halt operations. To fill the resultant gap, businesses might consider alternate analytics providers such as Ahrefs, Semrush, Similarweb, and Moz, among others.
"Twenty-five years ago, we founded Alexa Internet. After two decades of helping you find, reach, and convert your digital audience, we've made the difficult decision to retire Alexa.com on May 1, 2022. Thank you for making us your go-to resource for content research, competitive analysis, keyword research, and so much more.
Can I buy a new subscription?
No, Alexa.com stopped offering new subscriptions on December 8, 2021 UTC. Customers with existing subscriptions will continue to have access to their subscriptions until May 1, 2022 UTC.
Will I be charged for my existing subscription?
Yes, the last subscription billing date will be prior to April 1, 2022 UTC. Customers will continue to have access to Alexa.com until May 1, 2022 UTC.
I use the Alexa.com Top Sites and/or the Alexa.com Web Information Service APIs. What will happen to the APIs?
The APIs will be retired on December 15, 2022. You can find more information here: We will be retiring the Alexa.com APIs on December 15, 2022.
On the other hand, if you're an agency or tool provider who used Alexa data on the back end for your white label product, well. With that data being cut off, you need to find an alternative API to use or shutter your tool. Unfortunately, relatively few of the analytics platforms I'll list below have APIs you can use, so this will be a taller order. At least Amazon has given you nearly a full year to make this shift instead of the five months of notice normal business users get.
I've identified 20 of the best alternatives you can use for Alexa in web analytics. Many of these provide API access for an extra charge, so if you're looking for that specifically, be sure to do some hunting for their API page. Some of these services make it very easy to use their API, and others hide it behind a contact form. If you have a suggestion, feel free to leave it in the comments for me to check out.
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