Alexa.com has shutdown ending years of site rankings

Alexa.com, the most reliable platform for website rankings has announced that it has shutdown. Access to site rankings data is not available.

Alexa.com Rankings

Alexa.com is an amazon company that was founded in July 1996. Alexa was one of the most trusted sources of website rankings. Other than rankings, it offered other SEO services like keyword difficulty tool, backlink checker, on-page SEO analysis tool, SEO site audit, competitor keyword checking, etc.

Alexa.com also had an API for accessing website rankings that was used by hundreds of SEO and website statistics companies.

Alexa.com had grown to become the Godfather of website rankings.

Why Alexa.com Shutdown

Alexa.com was officially shut down on May 1, 2022. If you visit its homepage, you will get an end-of-service notice. Access to Alexa data via API will still be available until December 2022 for existing customers but without updates.

Amazon has not provided a specific reason as to why they decided to shut down Alexa. However, this is what we think about the shutdown.

• Data Collection: Unless you are a giant search engine like Google, which has access to website visits data (through Google Search and Google Chrome), it is difficult for any company to get accurate daily traffic data for over 1.8 billion websites that exist. Alexa admits that its rankings are based on a sample of global traffic. With growing concerns about privacy and limiting of access to data, the future did not look promising for Alexa.
• Revenue Sources:  Unlike Semrush and Ahrefs, Alexa.com had not positioned itself as an SEO company. It was mostly used for free to keep track of website ranking. This meant few subscribers.
• Amazon Alexa: If you search for Alexa on Google, most of the search results are for Amazon Alexa Voice Service, not Alexa Rankings. However, the first search result is for Alexa.com. To have a consistent brand image, it is likely that Amazon decided to focus on Alexa as the brand name of Amazon Alexa Voice Service only.  Amazon has also increased its investment in Amazon Alexa Voice Service and voice technology innovation.

Alexa ranking alternative

The best alternative to Alexa.com is Similarweb. The key weakness of Similarweb is that it only ranks websites with over 5k monthly visits. If you need rankings and your website has less than 5k monthly visits, you will be required to connect to Google Analytics.

Lessons learned

The main lesson we can learn from the shutdown of Alexa.com is that you should not build a website with dynamic information accessed through third-party APIs. Only use third-party APIs if the information you are fetching is static. For example company founder, founded date, etc.