Tranco Rank Lookup — The Free Alexa Rank Alternative That Actually Works

Bulk website ranking API. Academic-grade domain popularity data. No sign-up, no paywall, no dead endpoints.

Amazon retired Alexa.com rankings on May 1, 2022, leaving thousands of SEO pros, investors, security researchers, and journalists stranded without a public traffic-popularity signal. Every replacement since has been either (a) locked behind a $499/month SimilarWeb seat, (b) a sketchy "Alexa rank checker" site scraping stale Wayback data, or (c) hidden inside Semrush's 7-day trial funnel.

This actor fixes that. It queries Tranco — the academic, peer-reviewed domain ranking list published by DistriNet at KU Leuven — and returns clean JSON for bulk lookups, rank history, trend detection, similar-rank peer domains, and side-by-side baseline comparison. Free academic backend. Predictable pay-per-event pricing. Works at 1 domain or 10,000.

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Why Alexa Died, and Why Tranco Is the Credible Replacement

Alexa Rank was based on the Alexa Toolbar — a browser extension that hemorrhaged users after 2010 and was effectively data-dead long before Amazon pulled the plug. Its rankings for anything outside the top 100,000 were statistical noise by the end.

Tranco was built in 2018 by researchers Victor Le Pochat, Tom Van Goethem, Samaneh Tajalizadehkhoob, Maciej Korczyński, and Wouter Joosen specifically to address the reproducibility crisis in web-measurement research. It is:

• Academic and transparent. The methodology is published (NDSS 2019 paper) and the list is regenerated daily from a weighted combination of Cisco Umbrella, Majestic, Farsight DNSDB, Cloudflare Radar, and Chrome UX Report.
• Peer-reviewed. Used by over 1,000 published security and web-measurement papers. You can cite it in a whitepaper without getting laughed at.
• Daily. New list every 24 hours, with a stable list-ID you can reference for reproducibility.
• Manipulation-resistant. Combines multiple independent sources so it's much harder to game than any single-source ranking.
• Free for research and reasonable automated use. No API key required for small-scale queries.

Tranco is the list security researchers, browser vendors, and academics already use. This actor just wraps it in a clean, bulk-friendly, SEO-grade interface.

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Input Parameters

Field	Type	Default	Description
domains	string[]	["github.com","stackoverflow.com","news.ycombinator.com"]	Domains to look up. URLs, www-prefixed hosts, and apex domains are all accepted — they're normalized automatically.
include_history	boolean	true	Return daily rank history (within the history_days window). Disable for faster bulk-only lookups.
baseline_domains	string[]	["google.com","wikipedia.org"]	Reference domains every result is compared against. Use your own site + competitors.
history_days	integer (7–90)	30	How many days of historical rank data to include per domain.

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Output Example

Every result is pushed to the default dataset as a single JSON record:

{
  "domain": "github.com",
  "tranco_rank_current": 68,
  "tranco_rank_best_30d": 63,
  "tranco_rank_history": [
    {"date": "2026-03-20", "rank": 71},
    {"date": "2026-03-21", "rank": 70},
    {"date": "2026-04-16", "rank": 68}
  ],
  "trend": "up",
  "category_inferred": "Developer & Tech",
  "similar_domains": ["stackoverflow.com", "reddit.com", "netflix.com"],
  "comparison": {
    "google.com": {"baseline_rank": 1, "delta_vs_baseline": 67, "relative": "less_popular"},
    "wikipedia.org": {"baseline_rank": 12, "delta_vs_baseline": 56, "relative": "less_popular"}
  },
  "whois": {
    "source": "stub",
    "note": "See domain-whois-lookup actor for live data.",
    "domain": "github.com"
  },
  "list_source": "Tranco (tranco-list.eu) — DistriNet/KU Leuven",
  "fetched_at": "2026-04-17T14:22:03+00:00"
}

Domains outside the Tranco top 1M return a gracefully-handled record with tranco_rank_current: null and note: "not in top 1M" — this is the normal case for small sites, not an error.

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5 Real Use Cases

1. SEO Competitor Research

Drop your top 20 competitors into domains, put your own site in baseline_domains, and export to Google Sheets. Instantly see who's trending up, who's slipping, and which competitors share your popularity tier. Pairs well with a content audit — if a competitor jumped 15,000 ranks in 30 days, go look at what they published.

2. Investor & M&A Due Diligence

VCs and search-fund buyers routinely need to sanity-check a target company's traffic claims. Tranco gives you an independent, academically-credible datapoint to triangulate against whatever the seller is pitching. "Your deck says 2M monthly visits but your Tranco rank dropped from 45K to 310K" is a useful conversation.

3. Security & Threat-Intel Triangulation

Tranco is the gold standard for measuring domain prevalence in security research. Use this actor alongside VirusTotal scores, Cloudflare Radar signals, and passive DNS to score whether a suspicious domain is a legitimate high-traffic site or a fresh phishing lure. A domain that's not in the top 1M and has a 2-week-old cert is a very different risk profile than alexa-rank-450 with a 10-year WHOIS history.

4. Website Valuation / Flippa-Style Appraisal

When valuing a content site for acquisition, analysts want traffic rank trajectory, not just a single snapshot. The 30-day history + trend field gives you an instant "is this site growing, stable, or dying?" signal to feed into your valuation model.

5. Marketing Agency Client Reporting

Stop paying SimilarWeb $500/month just to include one chart in a monthly client deck. Schedule this actor weekly, pipe the output to Google Sheets via Apify integration, and generate rank-over-time charts for every client site for roughly the cost of lunch.

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Alexa vs Tranco vs SimilarWeb vs Semrush

Capability	Alexa Rank	Tranco Rank Lookup (this actor)	SimilarWeb	Semrush
Status in 2026	Dead since May 2022	Active, daily updates	Active	Active
Data source credibility	Toolbar-based, degraded	Academic, peer-reviewed, multi-source	Proprietary panel	Proprietary clickstream
Free tier	N/A (dead)	Unlimited lookups, PPE pricing	3 results/day	Trial only
Bulk API	Never existed cleanly	Yes — up to 10K domains/run	Enterprise only	Enterprise only
Price for 1,000 domain lookups	N/A	~$0.30 via PPE	$499+/month seat	$449+/month seat
Sign-up / credit card required	N/A	No (via Apify)	Yes	Yes
Academic citability	No	Yes — NDSS 2019 methodology	No	No
Output format	HTML scrape	Clean JSON, dataset, CSV, Excel	Dashboard	Dashboard

If you need panel-based traffic estimates (bounce rate, session duration, exact visit counts), SimilarWeb and Semrush still have their place. If you need a free, bulk-friendly, reproducible popularity rank — which is what 90% of "Alexa rank alternative" searches are actually looking for — Tranco is objectively the right tool, and this actor is the cleanest way to consume it.

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Why Run This on NexGenData / Apify?

• Zero infra. No Python environment, no rate-limit retry logic, no CSV stitching. Paste domains, click Run.
• Bulk-first. Built for lists of 100–10,000 domains, not one-off curl requests.
• Pay-per-event pricing. No monthly minimum. If you need 50 lookups, you pay for 50 lookups.
• Polite by default. 10 req/sec rate limit keeps Tranco's academic infrastructure happy — we want this list to stay free.
• Clean data contract. Stable JSON shape, graceful null handling for unranked domains, ISO-8601 timestamps.
• Fully integrated. Pipe directly to Google Sheets, Slack, Zapier, Make, n8n, or your own webhook via standard Apify integrations.

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Related Actors in the NexGenData Suite

• company-tech-stack-detector — reveal the CMS, framework, CDN, and analytics stack behind any domain. Pair with rank data for competitive intel.
• domain-whois-lookup — real WHOIS + RDAP domain-age and registrar lookup. Combine with rank for full domain profile.
• website-content-crawler — bulk-extract and clean page content from any rank-tier of domains you identify here.
• page-speed-analyzer — Core Web Vitals + Lighthouse scores. A high Tranco rank with bad CWV is a huge SEO opportunity.

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FAQ

Q: Is Tranco actually accurate? Honest answer: Tranco measures domain prevalence across multiple independent signals (DNS resolvers, CDN logs, Chrome UX data, managed DNS telemetry) — not direct human visitor counts. It's an excellent relative-popularity signal (much better than old Alexa) and it's manipulation-resistant, but it is not a substitute for panel-based traffic estimates like SimilarWeb if you need "1.2M monthly uniques" numbers. Use it the way the security and academic communities use it: as the best available public proxy for "how widely is this domain actually used on the open internet."

Q: Why do some domains return tranco_rank_current: null? Tranco only ranks the top ~1,000,000 domains globally. Anything smaller — which is the vast majority of the web — won't appear. This is normal and expected; we return a clean null with "note": "not in top 1M" rather than throwing an error.

Q: How fresh is the data? Tranco regenerates the list daily. This actor pulls the latest available ranking on each run. Daily history goes back years on the Tranco side; we expose the last 7–90 days per-domain.

Q: Can I use this commercially? Yes. Tranco is freely usable, and publishing a commercial lookup wrapper is within their stated terms. If you build something that hammers their API at high volume, consider using an authenticated Tranco account or downloading the full daily list (~20MB CSV) directly.

Q: Does this replace my Semrush / Ahrefs / SimilarWeb subscription? For rank and popularity — yes, almost certainly. For keyword-level search volume, backlink graphs, and panel-based traffic estimates — no, those products have their own moats. Think of this as the "rank checker" tab of those tools, carved out and made free.

Q: Why 10 requests/second rate limit? Tranco's infrastructure is academic. Being polite keeps the list free and public. 10 req/sec still gets you through 10,000 domains in ~17 minutes, which is plenty for almost every real use case.

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Built by NexGenData — more SEO and domain-intel actors at apify.com/nexgendata

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