Tranco Rank Explained

Tranco rank is a position in a free, research-oriented list of the most popular domains on the internet. Since Alexa Rank shut down in 2022, it has become one of the few open, independent ways to tell whether a website gets real traffic. Here is how the list is built, how to read a rank, and where its limits are.

Published: 2026-09-17 · Satelo

What Tranco is

Tranco is a top-sites ranking created by academic security researchers (led by a team at KU Leuven) and presented at the NDSS Symposium in 2019. The original goal was scientific: researchers often used popularity lists like Alexa to pick “typical” websites for studies, and the team showed that those lists were unstable and easy to manipulate. Tranco was designed to be more stable and harder to game.

The list is published daily at tranco-list.eu, covers roughly the top one million domains, and can be downloaded free of charge. That openness is why many tools, including Satelo, use it as a traffic signal.

How the list is calculated

Tranco does not measure traffic itself. It combines several independent popularity sources. At the time of writing, the default list draws on five providers:

Alexa was one of the original sources and was dropped after Amazon retired Alexa Internet in May 2022. The rankings are merged using the Dowdall rule (a positional voting method that gives more weight to higher positions) and averaged over 30 days. The averaging is the important part for site owners: a one-day spike, whether real or bought, barely moves the rank.

How to read a Tranco rank

Lower is better: rank 1 is the most popular domain. Some practical guidelines:

• Top 10,000: very large, well-known sites and major platforms.
• 10,000–100,000: established publications, big e-commerce, popular SaaS and large community sites.
• 100,000–1,000,000: a long tail of real, active sites with steady audiences: regional media, strong niche blogs, mid-sized businesses.
• Not listed: the majority of websites. This does not mean “no traffic”; it means below the threshold of the top million.

Tranco does not publish a conversion from rank to visits, and you should be wary of anyone who claims an exact figure. Use the rank to compare sites with each other, not to estimate monthly visits precisely.

Strengths of Tranco

• Free and open. Anyone can download the list and check how a domain is ranked, with a permanent ID for each daily list, which makes results reproducible.
• Hard to manipulate. Combining five sources and averaging over a month makes cheap bot traffic much less effective than it was with Alexa.
• Independent of backlinks for the most part. Only one of the five sources is link-based, so the list reflects real usage more than link-building activity.

Limitations to keep in mind

• It ranks domains, not websites. Some entries are infrastructure: CDNs, ad servers, API endpoints and tracking domains appear because DNS sources see them constantly.
• It favours global reach. A site that is popular in one smaller country may rank lower than its local importance suggests.
• It is coarse at the bottom. Between ranks 500,000 and 1,000,000, small changes in source data can move a domain a lot.
• Subdomains are usually grouped. The standard list aggregates to the registered domain, so blog.example.com counts towards example.com.

Using Tranco to vet a website

1. Look up the domain in the latest list (tranco-list.eu has a search box), or run a free Satelo check, which includes Tranco presence in the Quality Score.
2. Compare with authority scores. A site with DR 70 that is absent from Tranco often has links but no audience; see domain authority explained.
3. Look at history. Tranco keeps archived lists, so you can see whether a site was popular a year ago and fell away.
4. Combine with other signals: organic keywords, domain age, engagement. Our guide on checking website traffic free lists them.

Why Satelo uses Tranco in its Quality Score

Satelo’s QS needs signals that cannot be bought cheaply, because it is used to match sites of similar quality in the article exchange. Tranco fits: it is public, reproducible and resistant to short-term manipulation. It is only one input, alongside domain age (RDAP), Common Crawl index size, PageSpeed and verified traffic from the WordPress plugin, because most small sites are not in the top million and still deserve a fair score.

Tranco compared with other popularity signals

No single signal is enough. Tranco is valuable precisely because it is the one you can verify yourself, without trusting the site owner or a commercial model.

A worked example

Suppose you compare two blogs about personal finance before pitching a guest post. Blog one has a DR in the 60s and is absent from Tranco; its archived lists show it was never there. Blog two has a DR in the 40s and sits around rank 300,000, stable for over a year. Blog two almost certainly has more real readers, and a mention there is more likely to bring visitors. Blog one may still be fine, but it needs a closer look at its traffic and backlinks; our guide to spotting PBN sites lists what to check.

Another practical use: track your own site. If you enter the list for the first time, that is a meaningful milestone, and the 30-day average means it reflects sustained growth rather than one viral day.

How to download and search the list

1. Open tranco-list.eu and use the domain search for a quick lookup, including recent history.
2. For bulk checks, download the latest list as a CSV file: one row per domain with its rank.
3. Note the list ID if you share results with someone, so they can check the same version.

Next steps

Check where your domain stands with a free QS check. If you are not in Tranco yet, that is normal; focus on audience growth with ideas from how to promote a website for free and how to increase domain authority.

FAQ

Is Tranco the same as Alexa Rank?

No. Alexa used its own panel and was retired in 2022. Tranco aggregates several independent sources and averages them over 30 days.

How many sites are in the Tranco list?

The standard list covers about the top one million domains and is updated daily.

Can I convert Tranco rank into monthly visits?

Not reliably. Tranco does not publish traffic numbers, so use the rank for comparison rather than exact estimates.

How can I improve my Tranco rank?

Only by growing real, sustained usage. The 30-day average and multiple sources make short spikes ineffective.

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