Why QueryWatch is not a rank tracker, and never will be

The obvious feature request for any app that shows you search data is rank tracking: type in a keyword, see where you rank, watch it daily. QueryWatch does not do that, will not do that, and this post is the reasoning, because “we chose not to” is more useful to you than a missing menu item.

What a rank tracker does

A rank tracker runs a Google search for a keyword, from a chosen location and device, and records where your URL appears. It repeats that daily, for a list of keywords you chose, including ones you do not rank for yet and ones your competitors rank for instead. The result is a clean daily position per keyword per location, which is a useful thing to have.

To get it, the tracker has to query Google at scale, which means either scraping results pages directly or paying a service that does. Google’s terms of service do not permit automated queries of its search results, and never have. The entire category operates in a space Google tolerates rather than allows.

Why we will not

Three reasons, in order of weight.

The first is your account. A Search Console app holds a credential for your Google account, granted through Google’s own OAuth process and subject to Google’s verification. Running scraping infrastructure next to that credential puts your account alongside behaviour Google does not allow, and asks you to trust that the two never touch. We would rather not ask.

The second is honesty about what the product is. QueryWatch is a client for Search Console. It reads what Google reports about your sites, through Google’s public API, with your permission. A rank tracker is a different product that happens to show a number with the same name, and bolting one onto the other would make both worse.

The third is the name. An earlier working name for this app had the word “Rank” in it, and we dropped it partly for this reason: it advertised the one feature we had already decided never to build. QueryWatch watches queries, the ones you already appear for, which is exactly what Search Console is.

What Search Console’s position actually is

Average position is the average of the topmost position your site held for each impression, over real searches by real people, for queries you actually appeared for. It is not a probe from a data centre; it is a summary of what happened.

That makes it different from rank in two ways that matter. It is personalised and localised the way real results are, because it is made of real results, so it reflects what your searchers saw rather than what a logged-out browser in a particular city saw. And it is an average, so a page shown at position 2 for some searches and position 20 for others reports 11, a number nobody saw. Search Console metrics explained goes through the traps.

It is a better number for some questions and a worse one for others, and the mistake is treating either as the whole truth.

What you lose without a rank tracker

Keywords you do not rank for yet, because Search Console has no row for a query you never appeared for. Competitor positions, because Search Console only knows about your sites. A daily, location-specific position for a keyword a client cares about, because the average blends locations and days. And tracking of SERP features, like whether a featured snippet or a map pack sits above you.

If you need those, you need a rank tracker as well as this, and most SEO professionals already pay for one inside Semrush, Ahrefs, SE Ranking or similar. Nothing about QueryWatch replaces that, and we would rather say so than pretend.

How the two fit together

A rank tracker answers “where would we show, if someone searched this, here, today”. Search Console answers “what did we actually show, over every real search, and did anyone click”. The first is for planning and for keywords you are chasing. The second is for knowing what is happening to the traffic you have.

Inside Search Console, two things do part of a rank tracker’s job for the queries you already appear for. A watchlist of queries, five on the free tier and unlimited on Pro, keeps the ones you care about one tap away. And Pro’s new-top-ten alert notifies you the day a watched query, or any query with at least fifty impressions, enters positions 1 to 10, which is the one rank-tracking event most people actually want to hear about. The striking-distance view is the planning half: the queries at positions 8 to 20, ranked by what moving them would be worth.

The short version

If an app offers you both Search Console data and rank tracking in one place, ask how it gets the second and what that means for the credential it holds for the first. We would rather be the Search Console companion that is clearly only that, and leave rank tracking to the tools built for it. The comparison pages say what each of the other apps does and does not do, in their own words.