Alexa Traffic Rank
| Type of business | Internet |
|---|---|
Type of site | Web traffic and ranking |
| Available in | English |
| Founded | April 1, 1996 |
| Headquarters | San Francisco, California, United States |
| Owner | Amazon |
| Created by | Brewster Kahle, Bruce Gilliat |
| President | Andrew Ramm |
| Key people | Andrew Ramm (president and GM) Dave Sherfese (vice president) |
| Industry | Web traffic analytics |
| Products | Alexa "toolbar" (spybar) |
| URL | alexa.com |
| Registration | Optional |
| Current status | Online |
Alexa traffic rank is a web ranking service provided by Amazon subsidiary Alexa Internet Incorporated. Their web traffic ranking are entirely based on the one guy in India who has their web browser plugin installed, so the numbers are wildly inaccurate beyond the world wide webs top 1000 websites.
That One Guy In India With Their Web Browser Plugin[edit]
This website is among many that have been given a "traffic rank" by Amazon's Alexa subsidiary. They were ranking us at "432,856 in global internet engagement" in April 2021. One interesting detail to look at on their "traffic rank" page about us is Audience Geography. It will typically either show "No Results" or 100% from India if that one guy in India who has their web browser spyware plugin installed happened to visit our little website during the last three months. It wouldn't be hard for them to show something there if they actually had any real data, and they wouldn't regularly show India as the sole traffic source if they were collecting data from more than a handful of people with their web browser spyware installed. Their install-base is probably less than one in a hundred thousand, it could be as low as one in a million (just a hunch).
The other data Alexa shows for our site is pretty far from reality. We don't use any heavy analytics servers like Matomo (the best free software solution you can install on your own server). We do use AWStats and Webalizer to parse logs before they are thrown away every six hours. Those log parsers do not present a lot of very detailed data, but they do show more than enough to very clearly see that what little data Alexa offers on their page about our site is wildly inaccurate, likely because that one guy in India with their web browser plugin doesn't accurate represent our broader user-base.
The web traffic data Alexa offers for sites beyond the top-most 1000 websites is, at best, very questionable.
Alexa offers a paid service with some additional data beyond the useless and misleading data they provide for free. We have not tried it, but we can make an educated guess about its usefulness based on what you get to see for free and say that it's probably a complete waste of money. You are much better off looking into free software web traffic analytics tools you can install on your own server and get really detailed, or more general, information about your websites traffic - depending on what kind of tool you choose.
Alexa Top 50[edit]
Alexa has a public list of the "top 500 sites on the web" (it only shows the top 50). This list is probably accurate and the ranks they offer for sites up to the top 1000 is probably also accurate. Anything beyond that seems to be pretty random and mostly based on what sites that one guy in India with their spyware plugin installed visited the last few months.
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