Why Isn’t My Page Ranking?

Three sources. The live Google top 10 for your keyword comes from Serper.dev (a Google SERP API). Core Web Vitals come from Google PageSpeed Insights, with real-world field data backfilled from the Chrome UX Report when PageSpeed has none. Everything else — word count, headings, schema, links, keyword placement and so on — comes from our own server fetching and parsing each page, the same way a search engine would.

Paid content tools (SurferSEO is around £69/month, Clearscope more) run deep TF-IDF over large corpora and give you a live content editor with a target score. This tool is free and focuses on a direct, factor-by-factor comparison between your page and the live top 10 across 27 dimensions, plus a prioritised fix list. It does not include a content editor, and its topic analysis is an approximation (see below) rather than a full-corpus model.

We include a domain-authority score (0–10) from OpenPageRank, a free metric built on the open Common Crawl link graph. It’s a directional approximation of off-page authority — not Google’s own signal, and not the granular, per-link backlink data a paid index like Ahrefs or Majestic gives you (those need a continuously-crawled link index we don’t operate). We also flag whether your domain is a recognised entity — the registered official website of something with a Wikipedia presence (via Wikidata), a free proxy for Google’s Knowledge Graph. Domain age (from the registration record), URL depth and domain length round out the authority section as lighter signals. Treat it all as useful context, not a definitive verdict.

It’s directional, not exact. We run TF-IDF over the top terms our crawler extracts from each page (roughly the 40 most distinctive terms per page), not the full text of every document. That’s cheap and deterministic and is good for flagging genuine sub-topics the top 10 share that you’re missing — but it won’t match a tool that models the entire corpus word-for-word.

No. It’s our own weighted comparison of your page against the top-10 averages across the 27 factors we can measure. Google’s ranking algorithm uses hundreds of signals — including the full backlink graph and user-behaviour data we can’t see — so treat the score as a structured gap analysis, not a ranking prediction.

We fetch and audit up to 11 pages (yours plus the top 10) and run a separate PageSpeed Insights pass on each. PageSpeed is the slow part — it loads each page in a real browser. The pages are processed in parallel, so the total is usually well under a minute and a half.

Some sites block automated requests (Cloudflare challenges, bot walls). When a page can’t be fetched we drop it from the averages rather than guessing, and the report tells you how many of the top 10 were actually analysed in its data-coverage note.

Five per day per IP address, resetting at midnight UTC. Running the exact same URL, keyword and country again within 24 hours returns the cached report for free and doesn’t count against the limit. The cap keeps the shared free API budget usable for everyone.

Yes. Every report has a share link that stays live for 30 days, you can download a PDF summary, and you can copy a plain-text summary to paste into an email or brief. No sign-in needed for any of it.

Yes, and that’s the most common case. The tool compares your page against whoever currently ranks in the top 10 so you can see exactly which factors separate you from them. If your URL does appear in the results, we’ll also show its current position.