Track your search rankings

Kite lists every keyword your domain ranks for in Google's top 100 results by reading its built-in search data for your site. These are Google's results for searches made in the United States in English. For each keyword, Kite gets:

• the page on your site that ranks and its position
• the monthly search volume and how hard the keyword is to rank for
• the estimated number of visitors that position brings each month
• whether the search shows an AI Overview or a featured snippet, and whether your page owns the snippet
• whether the position is new, up, or down since the data was last refreshed, along with the previous position

The estimated visitors column is the one that makes the list useful. A keyword with 10,000 monthly searches where you sit in position 40 brings almost nobody to your site, while a keyword with 900 searches where you sit in position 2 might bring a few hundred visitors a month. Kite sorts by what each ranking is actually worth to you, so the long list becomes a short list of the positions that matter.

Kite can read the same list for any competitor's domain. That shows you which searches they rank for, which of their pages earn those rankings, and where they outrank you on searches you both appear for.

Kite tracks changes in two ways: a weekly check on the specific keywords you care about, and a month-by-month history of your whole domain.

For the weekly check, Kite keeps a list of tracked keywords for your site. It proposes the first list from its competitor research, and you can add or remove keywords whenever you like. Once a week, Kite reads where your site ranks for each one and compares the result with the week before. If a keyword falls out of the top 100 entirely, Kite says so in words rather than showing you a meaningless number.

Kite can also watch those keywords for you. You decide what counts as a real move, such as any keyword dropping five or more places, or any keyword falling off the first page of results. When that happens, Kite tells you which keywords moved, how far, and what it thinks caused it. If your team uses Slack, the alert arrives in the thread where you asked for the watch or in your team's channel. Otherwise, Kite emails it to the person who set the watch up. When Kite first tracks keywords for your team, it can start a ranking watch on its own and tell you why it exists and how to turn it off.

For the longer view, Kite reads a domain's ranking history month by month: how many keywords it ranked for and how much search traffic those rankings were likely to bring. Say your site ranked for 300 keywords last spring and 520 now, while a competitor went from 900 to 700 over the same months. That tells you who is gaining ground in your market, and Kite can look at which pages drove each change.

If you'd like a regular summary, ask Kite to send a monthly ranking and traffic report. Each run compares the new numbers with the previous month and calls out what changed.

Google Search Console answers this question with Google's own numbers, and Kite reads it for you. Ask about a page, and Kite pulls the searches that page appeared for, with the clicks, impressions, click-through rate, and average position behind each one.

This is the most reliable view of your traffic from Google, because it's what Google recorded rather than an estimate. It also catches searches that third-party data misses, especially long, specific questions that few people type but that often bring your best visitors. One limit is worth knowing. The position Search Console reports is an average across every time your page appeared, so Kite treats it as a trend to move rather than an exact place in the results.

Kite reads Search Console through your connected Google account, wherever your site runs. If Kite hosts your website on your own domain and you're on a paid plan, Kite verifies the site with Google itself and keeps a daily copy of its Search Console data, so there's nothing to connect.

Kite uses the page-level view to explain what a ranking change means. If your pricing page dropped from position 3 to position 6 for its main search, Kite checks whether clicks fell with it, whether the page lost other searches too, and which competitor page moved above it.

A list of rankings is only useful once it tells you where to spend your time, so Kite sorts your keywords into three groups. It leaves out searches with fewer than 100 monthly searches, because there's too little traffic in them to justify the work.

• Positions to protect. These are the searches where you already rank in the top three. They bring most of your search traffic, so Kite keeps an eye on them and proposes a refresh when one starts to slip.
• Pages a few places from the top. These are the searches where you rank between fourth and twentieth. Google already trusts your page for the search, and the top three results get most of the clicks, so a better page here usually pays off faster than a new one. Kite scores each search by how many more clicks a top-three position would bring.
• Searches competitors win and you don't cover. These are searches where a competitor ranks in the top 20 and your site doesn't appear. Kite looks at the competitor's page and decides whether to expand one of your existing pages or write a new one.

Kite also flags a page that's losing search traffic and explains why from its ranking history. Say a blog post that brought steady traffic for a year has lost half its clicks in a month. Kite might find that its main search fell from position 4 to position 11 after a competitor published a newer guide on the same topic. That tells you the post needs updating, rather than leaving you to guess.

Kite turns the sorted list into a plan and then does the work. For a page a few places from the top, it reads the pages ranking above yours and works out what they answer that yours doesn't. Then it rewrites the page, improves its title and description, and adds internal links from related pages on your site. For a search you don't cover, it writes a new page using what it knows about your products, customers, and brand voice.

Kite shows you each change before it goes live. On a website Kite hosts, it publishes the change itself once you approve it. If your site runs on Webflow, WordPress, Contentful, Sanity, or Storyblok, Kite makes the update through your connected content system.

After the change ships, Kite keeps reading the same keywords each week. Search rankings take time to settle, so Kite gives each change about a month before judging the result. Then it reports which positions moved, how much traffic followed, and what to work on next.