Where every number comes from
FeedPulse routes your queries through 7 industry-standard providers and our own first-party network. Below is the full breakdown — who we use, why we picked them, refresh cadence, and the accuracy bounds you should expect. No black boxes.
Tranco List
visit providerPrimary source for global Traffic Rank (top 1M domains)
- Method
- Tranco is a research-grade aggregator that combines the four major public top-million lists (Alexa, Cisco Umbrella, Majestic, Quantcast) into a single resilient ranking, refreshed daily. Originally published by KU Leuven researchers — the methodology paper is peer-reviewed and reproducible.
- Refresh
- Refreshed daily by Tranco; cached in our system for 7 days per domain.
- Accuracy
- Covers the top 1,000,000 domains globally. For sites in this range, position is highly accurate (we benchmark inside ±5% against SimilarWeb's paid tier). Outside top-1M, we fall back to OpenPageRank.
Moz Links API
visit providerPrimary source for Domain Authority (DA) + Backlink count + Referring Domains
- Method
- Moz's DA score is a 100-point logarithmic measure of a domain's backlink-graph quality, computed across their proprietary Mozscape index (40+ trillion links crawled). We query the Links API directly using a paid commercial license.
- Refresh
- Live queries with a 30-day per-domain cache (protects paid quota).
- Accuracy
- Industry-standard SEO metric used by 5+ million marketers. Limitation: DA can lag for very new sites (under ~3 months old) because Mozscape crawls less frequently than Google.
OpenPageRank
visit providerPrimary source for Domain Rating (DR); fallback for Traffic Rank beyond top 1M
- Method
- Open-source recreation of Google's original PageRank, built on the Common Crawl corpus. OpenPageRank publishes a raw 0–10 logarithmic backlink-authority score; we linearly rescale it ×10 so the DR Checker reports a 0–100 number — the convention every SEO reader knows from Ahrefs. The underlying signal is unchanged; only the presentation scale differs.
- Refresh
- Refreshed every 3 months by DomCop; we cache responses for 7 days per domain. Free tier is 1,000 lookups / month, so we cap each visitor to 2 checks per 24h (max 2 distinct domains) to protect the shared quota.
- Accuracy
- Excellent for relative comparisons. The `rank` field is backlink-authority weighted — NOT traffic weighted, which is why we use Tranco for the Traffic Rank tool and reserve OPR for the DR Checker + long-tail rank fallback.
Serper.dev
visit providerPrimary source for SERP Position Checker + Google Index Checker
- Method
- Wraps live Google SERP scraping with residential IPs so results match what a real user in the chosen region sees. Returns the top 100 results including positions, snippets, knowledge-graph hits, and AI Overviews.
- Refresh
- Live queries on every check, cached for 7 days per (domain, keyword, region, device).
- Accuracy
- Within ±1 position of a manual Google check 95%+ of the time (the remaining 5% reflects Google's natural per-user/per-session ranking variance).
SerpAPI
visit providerSecondary fallback for SERP + Index Checker (when Serper quota dips)
- Method
- Same approach as Serper — live Google SERP scraping with location-aware proxies. We use it as a quality-equal backup so the tool keeps working when one provider's free tier resets.
- Refresh
- Live queries, 7-day cache.
- Accuracy
- Identical to Serper for our use case.
DuckDuckGo HTML
visit providerLast-resort fallback for SERP + Index Checker
- Method
- Parses DuckDuckGo's public HTML results page. Used only when both Google providers above are quota-exhausted for the day so the tool never goes dark.
- Refresh
- Live queries, 1-hour cache when this path is hit.
- Accuracy
- Roughly approximates Google rank — DDG uses Bing as its primary backbone, so positions can drift by 3–8 places vs. Google. We flag results from this source with a yellow estimate badge so users know.
Google PageSpeed Insights
visit providerPrimary source for Lighthouse Score + Page Speed
- Method
- Google's own Lighthouse engine, run on Google's infrastructure against your live URL. Returns the four sub-scores (Performance, SEO, Accessibility, Best Practices) plus Core Web Vitals.
- Refresh
- Live queries, 24-hour cache per URL.
- Accuracy
- This IS the source Google uses to rank your site for performance — the score you see here is the exact same one Google sees.
FeedPulse Network
visit providerPrimary source for tracked sites' traffic & rank — REAL data
- Method
- Sites that install any FeedPulse widget become part of our cooperative analytics network. We aggregate anonymous visit data across all installed sites to produce REAL traffic ranks (not estimates) for member domains. Same idea Alexa used pre-shutdown.
- Refresh
- Live every 6 hours; aggregated visit data is bot-filtered.
- Accuracy
- 100% real measurement, not modeling. Only available for domains that have a FeedPulse widget installed.
Hard rate limits, no signup gates
Every tool enforces per-IP daily limits (5 SERP / 2 DA / 2 Backlinks / 2 DR / 10 Indexed-URL checks / unlimited Trust & Speed checks per 24h). These exist purely to protect our shared paid-API quota — there is no sign-in to lift them. The limits are deliberately generous for legitimate research use but stop scraping bots cold.
Aggressive caching protects budget
Moz responses cache for 30 days, OpenPageRank + Tranco + SERP for 7 days, PageSpeed for 24 hours. If two visitors check the same domain in the same window, only the first triggers an upstream call. This is how we offer paid-grade data 100% free without burning through commercial budgets.
Bot-filtered, no user tracking
We don't store IP addresses long-term, don't require accounts, and don't fingerprint browsers beyond the bare minimum needed to enforce the rate limits (rolling 24h sliding window, then forgotten). No third-party analytics on these pages — what you see is what we know.
Want to try the tools? Each one shows you the exact source on every result: