What we publish
- Measurement guides that define a metric, show how to calculate it, give a worked example and list its limits.
- Measurement hubs that group guides by question: rank tracking, SERP intelligence, competitors, Search Console, international and reporting.
- Market protocols for the United Kingdom, United States, Canada and Germany, with dated legal context from regulators and legislation.
We do not publish rankings of real sites, traffic estimates, market-share figures or benchmark studies. We have not run one yet. If we do, it will meet the standard below.
How we source claims
- Primary first: Google Search Central documentation and Search Console Help for search behavior; regulators, legislation and official registers for market rules.
- Dated: each source is listed with its published or last-updated date and the date we checked it. Help pages that show no date are marked so.
- Quoted exactly: quotation marks mean verbatim wording. Paraphrase never sits inside quotation marks.
- Secondary sources labeled: where only trade press reports something (for example a Google statement given to a journalist), we say so.
How examples are made
Worked examples use small invented datasets so the arithmetic is easy to follow. They are labeled "synthetic" or "not observed data", use placeholder domains on the .example domain reserved for documentation by RFC 2606, and describe no real site or operator.
How the terminal demo works
The terminal on our home page is an illustrative demo. Its data comes from a script (src/tools/demo_data.py in the site source) that generates keyword rows, positions, volatility series and competitor shares from a fixed random seed. Nothing is collected from Google or any other search engine, and no figure reflects a real ranking. The CSV export begins with the line "DATA_STATUS,ILLUSTRATIVE DEMO - SYNTHETIC EXAMPLE DATA - NOT LIVE RANKING DATA". The terminal and the two demo panels below it carry the badge "ILLUSTRATIVE DEMO · Synthetic example data · Not live rankings", and every table and chart caption says the data is synthetic.
The standard for any future study
| Item | Requirement |
|---|---|
| Keyword set | Full list or a downloadable file, with selection rules and version |
| Conditions | Search engine, locations, devices, languages, depth |
| Dates | Collection dates and times with time zone |
| Source and permission | Named data provider or first-party source, and the terms that allow publication |
| Method | Formulas, weights, exclusions and missing-data rules |
| Limits | Coverage gaps, known issues, confidence |
| Replication | Enough detail for another analyst to repeat it |
What we will not do
We will not scrape Google results for rank checking. Google's spam policies define machine-generated traffic to include "scraping results for rank-checking purposes". Any ranking data we publish will come from a provider whose terms allow it, or from first-party sources, and the source will be named.
Review and corrections
Every page shows when it was published, updated and when its sources were checked. Corrections follow our editorial standards. See also data sources and limitations.
Sources
- Search Console Help: What are impressions, position, and clicks? no date shown
- Google: Spam policies for Google web search updated August 28, 2026
- IETF RFC 2606: Reserved top level DNS names (.example) June 1999