A free website rank checker, and where the number comes from
Paste a domain and the website rank checker uses the first source that has data for it, in this order. If the site is registered with FeedPulse and runs one of our widgets, you get its rank among FeedPulse sites, based on visits recorded over the last 30 days. Otherwise you get its position in the Tranco list, a public research ranking of the top one million domains. For domains outside that list we fall back to OpenPageRank's rank, which is calculated from links between websites rather than visits. Most well-known sites come from Tranco; small sites often come back from OpenPageRank or as unranked.
What a website traffic rank tells you, and what it doesn't
A website traffic rank is a position, not a measurement. Rank 1 is the most popular site in the list, and a lower number means more popular. That makes it useful for quick comparisons: is this competitor in the same league as you, and is the site you're about to partner with a real, visited website? It can't tell you how many people read a specific page, where they come from or whether they buy anything. For your own site, your analytics tool is always more accurate than any public rank.
About the monthly visits estimate
Next to a Tranco or OpenPageRank position we show an estimated monthly visits figure. It comes from a simple formula that maps a rank to a typical visit count, fitted to a handful of public reference points, and it is labelled 'estimated'. Treat it as a rough order of magnitude: a site shown with 50K visits a month might really get 20K or 150K. For sites in the FeedPulse network we show the visits we actually recorded in the last 30 days instead, labelled 'actual'.
Why we use Tranco for global ranks
Tranco is maintained by academic researchers who built it because single-vendor top-site lists were easy to manipulate and jumped around from day to day. It combines several existing top-site lists and averages them over 30 days, so a one-day traffic spike barely moves a site's position. The trade-off is that Tranco only covers the top one million domains and only says where a site sits, not how many visits it gets. We cache each Tranco lookup for seven days.
An Alexa rank alternative: what changed after 2022
Amazon retired Alexa.com on May 1, 2022, and with it the free Alexa traffic rank that bloggers once showed in their sidebars. Since then there has been no single public replacement. Similarweb and Semrush publish rank figures, but most of their detail sits behind paid plans or sign-in limits. FeedPulse Rank is a free Alexa rank alternative in the simple sense: one public number for any domain, plus a badge you can embed. It isn't built from Alexa's old data, and it won't match Alexa's historical ranks or Similarweb's figures, because each list counts popularity differently.
If you came looking for a similarweb alternative free of charge, this covers the quick 'how big is this site?' check. It doesn't replace Similarweb's traffic-source, audience or keyword breakdowns, which no free tool reproduces reliably.
How to compare two sites fairly
Compare ranks from the same source. A Tranco position and an OpenPageRank position measure different things, so a site at #40,000 in Tranco and another at #40,000 in OpenPageRank aren't equal. Read ranks as bands rather than exact positions: the gap between #250,000 and #260,000 is noise, while the gap between #20,000 and #500,000 is real. And re-check over a few weeks before drawing conclusions, since each rank result is cached for up to three days.
Why your rank can differ from other tools
Tranco publishes a fresh list every day, but its positions are averaged over 30 days, so a site that's growing fast will look lower than it is for a few weeks. OpenPageRank's rank reflects links, so a site with many links and little traffic can look stronger there than it really is. Neither is wrong: they measure different things, which is why the result tells you which source it came from.
Add a website rank badge to your site
Copy the HTML snippet, paste it in your sidebar or footer, and the badge shows your current FeedPulse Rank. Once your site is registered and running a FeedPulse widget, its rank comes from the FeedPulse network instead, based on recorded visits. The badge works on WordPress, Shopify, Wix, Webflow, Ghost, Squarespace, Blogger and plain HTML.