Your Rank Check Is Lying to You

Search results are shaped by where the request came from, what language the browser asked for and what it has seen before. How to run a ranking check that means something.

Open a search engine in your own browser, type the term you care about, and what comes back is not the ranking. It is your ranking: shaped by your location, your language settings, your account, and everything that browser has been shown before.

Three things move a result, and you control all of them

• Where the request came from, which is your IP address and nothing else
• What language and region the browser asks for, which is a header and a setting
• What the browser already knows: cookies, a signed-in account, and prior searches

An incognito window addresses the third and none of the first two. A VPN addresses the first and leaves the browser reporting the language and timezone of your own desk, which is a combination no ordinary visitor from that country has.

A profile per market

The fix is to make the whole environment agree. A region preset sets the language, the timezone and the screen size as one coherent set; a proxy in that country puts the request where it belongs. German language, German timezone, German route. Not one of the three.

Because the environment lives on the profile rather than on your machine, next month's check runs against the same conditions as this month's. That is the part that turns a screenshot into a measurement: not accuracy in the absolute, but comparability over time.

Keep the profiles clean

A checking profile should not be signed into anything, should not be the profile you also read the news in, and should not carry the extensions your working browser does. Its whole job is to be uninteresting. Nothing is shared between profiles, so an unremarkable one stays unremarkable.

Automating the pass

Once a market is a profile, a weekly check is a loop. The Local API starts each market's profile and hands back the browser's debugging endpoint, so the pass runs from a script against the same environments a person would have opened by hand.