RankTracer: the service closed in 2015, and the sentence it left behind is the useful part

If you are looking for RankTracer the product, it is not available. The site at ranktracer.com states plainly that the sales rank tracking service it used to run closed in 2015, that what remains on the domain is a set of method notes about reading rank data, and that there is no product there and nothing to buy. Checked on 20 October 2026. Two things follow that are worth more than the tool was. First, it tracked marketplace sales rank, which on Amazon is the Best Sellers Rank, and that is a completely different measurement from a search engine ranking, so a good share of the people searching this name are looking for the wrong category of tool. Second, the notes left on that domain open with the sentence that explains nearly every mistake made with this data: a rank is a position, not a number of sales.

This page covers what the service measured, why a rank is not a sales figure, what to use now for each job, and the tools people confuse it with.

Two different things are called rank

	Marketplace sales rank	Search engine ranking
What it measures	A product's position in a category, driven by its recent sales relative to other products in that category	A page's position in the results for a particular query
Who produces it	The marketplace, most familiarly as Amazon's Best Sellers Rank	The search engine, read either from your own console or by a tool taking a reading
What moves it	Your sales, and everybody else's sales, which is why it moves when you have done nothing	Your page, your links, the competing pages, and the engine's own updates
What it is used for	Estimating demand, judging a launch, picking products to sell	Judging whether a page is winning the query it was written for
Which tools serve it	Marketplace research and price history tools	Rank trackers and position checkers

RankTracer was in the left hand column. If you arrived here wanting the right hand column, the categories of tool that do that job and how to choose between them are in SERP position tools, the four categories and how to pick one.

What a sales rank actually tells you

Four properties of the number, all of which are the reason it gets misread.

• It has no unit. Rank 4,000 is not four thousand of anything. It is a position in a queue, and the queue is ordered by recent sales.
• It is relative, so it moves when other people move. Your rank can fall while your sales are flat, because somebody else had a good week. Every conclusion from rank data has to survive the question of what it is being compared with.
• It is category bound. The same rank in a huge category and a small one represent very different numbers of sales, so comparing ranks across categories produces nonsense.
• The effect of a sale decays. A steady rank means steady sales rather than no sales, and a product that stops selling drifts down gradually rather than dropping off a cliff. That gradual drift is frequently mistaken for a penalty or an algorithm change.

The four mistakes this data invites

• Treating rank as a sales figure. The most expensive one, because it ends in inventory decisions. Any conversion from rank to units is a model built on somebody's sample, and it carries a margin of error that the clean number on the screen hides.
• Reading one reading instead of a series. A single rank is a snapshot taken at a moment when a competitor might have been running a promotion. A week of readings is data; one is an anecdote.
• Comparing across categories or marketplaces. Different population, different ordering, no shared scale.
• Attributing a move to yourself. Before concluding that your change in price, title or advertising moved the rank, check whether the whole category moved. Half of the dramatic swings are seasonal or competitive, and they happen to everybody at once.

What to use now, by the job you are doing

The job	Where to get it	What to remember
Your own sales, exactly	Your marketplace seller account's own reports	This is the only measured number in the whole subject. Everything else is an estimate, including every rank based figure
Price and rank history for any product	History trackers such as Keepa or CamelCamelCamel	Good for seeing how a product behaves over months, which is exactly what a single rank reading cannot show
Demand estimates and product research	Research suites such as Jungle Scout or Helium 10	They convert rank into estimated sales using their own models. Treat the output as an ordering of opportunities rather than a forecast
Why your own listing ranks where it does in marketplace search	Not a rank tracker at all. That is listing work	Covered in how an Amazon listing gets ranked

One discipline carries over from the closed service's own notes and is worth keeping whichever tool you use: record the series, not the number. A column of dated readings for your product and for three competitors answers questions that no single lookup can, and it costs nothing but the habit.

Sales rank against search ranking, for anybody selling on both

If you sell your own products on your own site and on a marketplace, you are working with both numbers at once and they reward different things. The marketplace position responds mostly to sales velocity and conversion on the listing. The search position responds to the page, the links and the competing pages. The practical consequence is that the two cannot be managed with one tool or one report, and a drop in one tells you nothing about the other.

RankTracer: what people are actually asking

Is RankTracer still available?

No. The site states that the sales rank tracking service closed in 2015 and that nothing is for sale on the domain now, which is what it said when this page was checked on 20 October 2026. What is published there is a set of notes on reading rank data rather than a tool.

What did it do?

It tracked marketplace sales rank over time, which is the kind of monitoring an author or a seller uses to see how a product is moving. The same job is now done by price and rank history trackers and by the research suites.

Is RankTracer the same as RankTracker?

No, and the similar names are the reason this question gets asked. RankTracer tracked marketplace sales rank and has closed. The tools called rank tracker, including a well known subscription product and the desktop application inside SEO PowerSuite, track search engine positions for keywords, which is an unrelated measurement.

Does Best Sellers Rank mean the same as sales?

It reflects sales rather than reporting them. It is a position relative to other products in the same category over a recent window, with no unit attached, which is why two products at the same rank in different categories sold different quantities.

What is the best free way to see a product's rank history?

The free tiers of the price and rank history trackers show a usable history for most products, and they are the quickest route to a series rather than a single reading. For your own products, your seller reports are free, exact and better than any of it.

Does Best Sellers Rank affect where a product appears in marketplace search?

Not as a dial you can turn. Sales velocity and conversion influence where a listing appears, and the rank is a visible reflection of that same velocity, so the two move together without one causing the other. Working on the listing and the conversion rate is the lever; the rank is the readout.

The measurement with no rank at all

There is a third kind of position worth knowing about, and it has no number. When a shopper asks an assistant which product to buy in a category, the answer names a few and explains why, with no ordered list behind it and no rank you can look up. The thing that decides whether you are named is what the web says about your product, and the awkward part is that it changes without any action from you, exactly like a sales rank. The difference is that nobody publishes the position, so the only way to read it is to ask the question repeatedly and record what comes back. Our note on why there is no rank to track, and the five numbers to use instead sets out what to measure in its place.