Best [Product] Rankings in Search

Over the last few years when reporting on the SEO industry via our sister site, Detailed.com, I (Glen Allsopp) have tried to minimise reporting on smaller, independently owned websites.

My primary interest is in the revenue companies are generating from search, and how media networks and public brands dominate Google's results. Just 16 are behind 500+ sites (and you'll be familiar with many of them).

The reason to try to "protect" smaller websites is simply because not everyone wants the spotlight of the SEO industry on them, for many debated reasons (e.g. getting inspiration for terms to target and places to build links).

I've been tracking many of these industries for years and always wanted to share some form of the raw data, especially when big brand domination appears to be at an all-time high.

I asked for advice on social media about how I might do so in a more ethical manner. You can see the posts on X and LinkedIn.

If you click on either of those links, you'll see the feedback was overwhelmingly along the lines of "The data is public anyway so it's OK to share", even from people who I know don't share their websites in the open.

Still, I don't think it's right to share everything, so currently have some rules in place:

We only show 20 sites per table. This massively cuts down on how many independent websites might be shown at any given time.

We only show sites with a DA of 25+. Domain Authority (DA) is a metric from Moz about the estimated authority of a website. It's not perfect, but allows smaller sites to build up some authority before potentially being included here.

There's no table for sites trending down. You can see losses a site may have experienced compared to a previous time, but no list of the "Biggest losers" or similar.

I'm definitely thinking too much, but I don't want to worry investors or employees a business might have, especially when we're not checking every keyphrase on the planet.

We don't show keyphrases any site ranks for. This wouldn't be a problem for bigger sites, but potentially more of a concern for smaller, independent brands.

You can't look back at data over multiple years. Smaller sites are only likely to 'trend' for a short period of time, and then they'll only show again if they become one of the top websites in their entire industry.

There may be some changes to the above in the future (a higher DA requirement, more sites per table, etc), but this seems like the fairest route today.

That's hopefully part of the beauty of what we're doing here: We're only tracking keywords relevant to the core of what a business is about.

It may be the case that a company has lost lots of irrelevant rankings (e.g. gaming sites ranking for spammy terms in their comment section) but are gaining rankings for what they're primarily known for (game walkthroughs and guides). In that case, you would see a drop in Ahrefs / Semrush / etc. but a spike here.

The whole aim here is to try to give a different, relevant perspective to search results and not just any and all keywords a site might rank for.

Of course, knowing about all rankings can be very valuable, which is why we link directly to both platforms for each site. We're just putting our own spin on things as we so often advise in our monthly income reports.

We keep it simple: For a first place organic ranking you get ten points, 2nd place nine points, and so on. As multiple rankings in one search result shows true prominence, you can get multiple scores.

In other words, ten first-place rankings would get you 100 points. Five first-place and five second-place rankings would get you 95 points (50 + 45).

We've been tracking some niches for over two years, and most for at least six months. Unfortunately I deleted past data on Gaming and Fashion as I had no personal use for it.

Once I knew I was going to make some of the data public I decided to start tracking them again, so we're simply waiting for them to have three months of ranking data. We'll also add Beauty and Automotive once they have two weeks of data (one more week to go).

I'm writing this answer on the day of launch (your feedback and support on X & LinkedIn is appreciated) as I was just asked this question via email.

No data is taken from either platform. We're linking to them as if you want to do more research on a particular site, you're possibly already paying for one of those two. Basically, the links are there to try and make this page more valuable for you.

Until one of Semrush, Ahrefs or Moz finally acquires us (my demand is that I still work on Detailed & Gaps-style content for years, hah) then the data is something we collect ourselves.

Some of the key things we've tried to do are:

• Avoid brand names that might skew rankings
• Avoid years e.g. 2024, 2025
• Avoid questionable topics
• Limit keyphrase length (generally 3-6 words)

We've tried to cover everything from the view point of "Would a business in the space actively try to rank for this topic?"

Just to clarify, our keyphrase data is far from perfect, but better than any automated outputs we've seen. It's something I imagine we'll try to clean and improve constantly.

In the SEO niche we look at people searching for things like hreflang implementation, link building tools, title tag recommendations and recommended agencies.

In fashion we are heavily product focused, so looking at rankings for descriptive terms around jeans, dresses, hats, scarves, shoes, belts and similar items.

In gaming we're almost exclusively focused on walkthroughs, tips and tricks for specific titles.

For more specifics, on each industry page, under the table of top ranking sites, you'll see exact keyphrases we look at.

That would be great, thank you. We've already added niches like Automotive, Beauty and Crypto since launching. Please email hey @ gaps.com.