It has been for very long time that the internet is a place where websites compete to be on top.
Among the many tools webmasters and web owners can use to analyze their websites' rank and traffic, Alexa Internet is one of the oldest. The American web traffic analysis company that is based in San Francisco is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Amazon.
After two decades offering its services to the many webmasters and web owners alike, Alexa Internet is shutting down.
On its announcement:
We have been proud to serve you as customers.
With its services ending, Alexa Internet stops offering new subscriptions, with all existing subscriptions to end on May 1, 2022.
"After that, customers will no longer have access to Alexa.com," the announcement said.
As for Alexa's API, the company is retiring it on December 15, 2022.
Alexa Internet was founded as an independent company in 1996, co-founded by Brewster Kahle, before Amazon acquired it in 1999 for $250 million.
Throughout its life, Alexa provides web traffic data, global rankings, and other information on the many websites the internet has to give.
Its meteoric rise began in the early 2000s, the time when Alexa began partnering with Google and the then-defunct web directory DMOZ.
Later, Alexa opened its extensive search index and web-crawling facilities to third-party programs through a comprehensive set of web services and APIs.
Since then, Alexa Traffic Rank became increasingly common for those who wish to monitor the popularity trend of a website and compare the popularity of different websites.
Alexa's Rank has been the de facto ranking system used to judge the popularity of websites, and is also used by most if not all web traffic analytics tools out there.
Originally, a site's Alexa's Traffic Rank was estimated based on a its web traffic that is sampled from millions of internet users using its browser extensions, as well as from sites that have chosen to install the Alexa script.
According to its support page, Alexa’s Traffic Ranks are based on the traffic data provided by Alexa’s global sample over a rolling 3 month period, and are updated daily.
Then in 2010–2020, Alexa evolved to use more technologies to allow it to keep ahead of the website metrics around the world.
For example, it added algorithms to 'correct' various potential biases and attempts to compensate for visitors who might not be in Alexa’s measurement panel, and normalizes the data based on the geographical location of visitors.
While Alexa's Traffic Rank provides a quick summary that has long been considered the benchmarking of websites' rank, there are limitations.
For example, Alexa's Traffic Rank only measure sites that are are above 1,000,000. This is because websites that are below that are less popular, and that Alexa doesn't receive enough data from our sources to rankings statistically meaningful. The closer a site to number 1, the more reliable Alexa's Traffic Rank becomes.
It should be noted that Alexa's database served as the basis for the creation of the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, which was also founded by Kahle.
Read: Your Website On Alexa For Ranking Popularity And Comparison Purposes