Tranco list

Tranco is a free, research-oriented ranking of the most popular one million domains on the web. It averages several provider rankings over 30 days to resist manipulation and daily noise, and each list gets a permanent ID so studies can cite the exact version they used.

Updated: 2026-10-16 · Glossary: Site metrics

Where the rank comes from

The Tranco project was created by academic researchers after the retirement of Alexa rankings left a gap and earlier lists proved easy to manipulate. Its site lists the providers it combines, among them Cisco Umbrella, Majestic, the Chrome User Experience Report and Cloudflare Radar, and the standard list is built by averaging the rankings over the past 30 days. Only domains that make the top million get a rank.

What it tells you

• A rank is an order-of-magnitude popularity signal, not a visit count.
• Being absent does not mean a site has no visitors; most small sites are below the top million.
• Ranks move slowly because of the 30-day averaging.

A longer explanation with examples is in Tranco rank explained.

Why it matters for small sites

Tranco is one of the few free, transparent popularity sources, so it is useful for sanity-checking traffic claims from guest post sellers and comparing sites of different sizes. For sites below the top million you need other signals: real-user data, verified analytics or your own logs.

How Satelo uses it

The Quality Score turns a Tranco rank into a rough monthly-visits band (for example, top 10,000 or top 100,000) as one input to the traffic component, alongside presence in the Chrome UX Report and verified pageviews from the Satelo plugin, which replace estimates when available. See how a site looks on the website traffic checker.

Related terms

• Satelo Quality Score: The Satelo Quality Score is a 0–100 rating of a website built mostly from open data: popularity lists, open link graphs, domain age, plus a crawl of the site's content and technical health.
• Domain Rating (DR): Domain Rating (DR) is a proprietary 0–100 metric from Ahrefs that estimates the strength of a website's backlink profile compared with other sites in Ahrefs' index.
• Crawl budget: Crawl budget is the number of URLs a search engine crawler can and wants to fetch from a site in a given period.

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