RankedContentChangelog
What’s new in RankedContent
Features and improvements, newest first. New here? Start with the help center.
- Fixed
Google index status answers for the page we scored
Analysis: when the address you enter redirects, for example from the bare domain to www, the Google index status now answers for the page we actually scored and says which address was checked. Until now it answered for the address as typed, which could read "not indexed" for a page that is indexed at its final address.
- Fixed
Rank checks see through redirect-wrapped Google results
Rank tracking: fixed a case where redirect-wrapped Google results hid your own pages in a check. Checks since Oct 30 were re-read and corrected.
- Improved
The weekly digest names the Search Console queries that moved
The Monday digest's Search Console section now names each query and the page behind it, with the positions: the queries that newly came within striking distance, and the ones where a page of yours dropped 10 or more places this week against last week. Each line opens its Discovery list. Until now the digest only counted them.
- New
How the AI engines portray your brand
Every AI engine check that names your brand now records how the answer portrayed it - positive, neutral or negative. The Keywords scoreboard shows a sentiment word next to each engine's status, read over the recent checks that named your brand; the keyword page lists the portrayal of every check and adds it to the citation trend; the AI visibility panel sums it up per engine. Sentiment has been recorded since your first AI engine check, so the history is already there.
- New
Video tutorials
RankedContent now has a YouTube channel with step-by-step video tutorials, starting with a 5-minute tour of the whole workflow: analyze a page, apply the fixes, work the task board and track your keywords in Google and AI search. Watch the tour on the home page, find the playlist under Tutorials on the Help page, and follow the channel from the link in the website footer.
- New
Book a free 45-minute consultation
The Done-for-you page, the pricing page and the contact page now lead to a booking calendar: pick a time, and George looks at your site before the call.
- New
Connect Google Search Console to a project
Users can now connect a project to its Google Search Console property, with read-only access you can revoke at any time. RankedContent imports the site's search performance once a day - the queries people searched, the pages that appeared, impressions, clicks and positions, filtered to the project's country - starting with the last three months. The new Discovery tab turns that data into lists you can act on: Striking distance, the queries where a page of yours sits just off the first page; Untracked winners, the queries you already win and could track; Decliners, the queries that slipped this week; and AI Overview gaps, the searches where Google's AI answer leaves your site out. Each row ends in an analysis or a tracked keyword. The weekly digest counts the week's new striking-distance queries and decliners, and the Help page explains how the Search Console numbers relate to your tracked positions.
- New
AI engine checks now run during the free trial
Every keyword on a free trial now gets the same AI engine checks as a paid plan: a first check the moment the keyword is added, then one every week, through ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. The keyword page shows the per-engine status, the citations, and the competitor mentions for each check, so you can fix a page with the analyzer and watch the next check pick it up. The trial keeps its 3 keyword slots and 5 page analyses. A paid plan adds more keywords, more sites, and a monthly analysis allowance.
- New
Download a project's issues and fixes as a CSV
Each project page now has a Download CSV button on its Tasks tab. The file lists, for every analyzed page in the project, the checks that are not passing with the fix we recommend, plus the tasks on the board with their status and priority, one row each. Open it in a spreadsheet to sort, filter or fold it into your own client report. It is part of CSV export.
- Improved
Keyword checks say when they are running
While a keyword's Google check is running, its row now reads "Checking…" and the Run now button waits for the result instead of starting a second check. You see it after adding or tracking a keyword, after a Run now click and during the weekly check. Results still appear on their own.
- Improved
Sign in with an emailed code, no password
Signing in now takes your email address and the six-digit code we send to it. There is no password to create, remember or reset. Accounts that had a password no longer use one, and nothing else about your account changed. If you use two-step verification, the authenticator step still follows the code.
- Improved
Billing answers on the Help page
The Help page FAQ now answers the questions people ask about paid plans: how to change or cancel a plan, what happens when a renewal payment fails, what happens if you stop paying, and how refunds work. The answers match the Pricing page word for word, and the analysis question now explains the monthly allowance on paid plans.
- New
Plans and prices are now public
The new Pricing page shows the Starter, Growth and Premium plans side by side: monthly and yearly prices, what each plan includes, a comparison table, and answers to the questions people ask about limits, plan changes and refunds. Find it under Pricing in the website menu.
- New
One reminder a month after your account is paused
If your trial ends or your subscription stops and you do not come back, you get one email a month later: your projects, keywords and tracking history are still exactly where you left them, with the date they are kept until. One email, never more. Switch it off under Settings, Email notifications, Win-back reminders, or with the unsubscribe link at the bottom of the email. Notices about data removal are always delivered.
- New
An email when your trial ends or your subscription is paused
You now get a short email the day your free trial ends, and another if a paid subscription ends - because you canceled it or a payment could not be collected. Both say the same thing: your account is paused, nothing has been deleted, your projects, keywords and tracking history are kept for 90 days, and one click on 'See plans' brings everything back exactly where you left it. A paused account gets one final notice a week before its data is removed. The trial reminder emails now link straight to the plans page as well.
- New
Choose and pay for a plan online
Choose a plan and pay by card from inside the app. Click 'See plans' at the top of the dashboard or under Settings to see the Starter, Growth and Premium plans, monthly or annual, with the full feature list for each. Once the payment goes through, your account switches over within seconds. The plan card then shows your renewal date and a Manage billing button for invoices, the card on file, plan changes and cancellation. If a plan change leaves you with more keywords than slots, the newest ones are paused, not deleted - resume any of them from the Keywords page once you have room.
- Improved
The AI Crawler Access Checker now claims only what it proved
A green engine verdict reads "No block in robots.txt" instead of "No block found", because that is what the check proves: your robots.txt permits the crawler, plus one fetch of your homepage from our servers that was not challenged. The firewall card now says the same in plain words - a clean fetch is not a pass, since hosts and firewalls decide per visiting network and over time, and a failed analysis will name the layer that blocked it. A detected challenge is still reported as a firm verdict with the fix. Share text and link previews use the new wording.
- New
Remove a keyword you no longer need - its history stays
Every keyword now has a Remove control next to Run now and Pause, on the Keywords page and on the keyword's own page. Removing a keyword takes it off your list and frees its slot right away, but nothing is deleted: every check it ever had is kept, and if you add the same keyword again later - by hand or from an analysis - it picks up exactly where it left off. Pause is still there for keywords you plan to come back to soon.
- Improved
A failed analysis now tells you which bot protection blocked it, and how to fix it
When your site's hosting or firewall answers our fetcher with a CAPTCHA or a block instead of the page, the failure message now names the layer that did it and the exact step that lets us through - a support request to your host, a setting you can change yourself, or a firewall rule - with a link to our crawler page for the details. Browsers pass these checks invisibly, which is why the page looks fine to you while the analysis fails.
- Improved
The AI Crawler Access Checker shows the crawlers under each AI answer engine
One list instead of two: each AI answer engine shows its verdict and expands to the crawlers behind it, with the exact robots.txt rule when one is blocked. The green verdict now reads "No block found", because the check covers robots.txt and one fetch from our servers - a host's bot protection can still challenge other automated readers, and the firewall section now says so.
- Improved
Desktop and Mobile no longer hide each other on the Position trend
On a keyword's page, the Position trend now draws the Desktop line a little above and the Mobile line a little below a position they share - the usual case for a keyword outside the top 50 - so both lines stay visible. Hover a week for the exact positions.
- New
See your competitors in every keyword check
Add up to five competitor domains in a project's tracking settings and each keyword page now shows them check by check. The Google check history lists every competitor's position next to yours, and the AI engine check history shows if each competitor was cited, mentioned, or not seen in the answer.
- Improved
Adding a keyword no longer spends an on-demand check
Every new keyword still gets its first position check the moment you add it - by hand on the Keywords page or from an analysis - but that first check no longer counts against your on-demand allowance. The "on-demand checks left this month" line on the Keywords page and the "Run-now checks" row on your plan card now mean exactly what they say: the Run now clicks you have left.
- Improved
How to fix snippets now show exactly what to replace
The How to fix guidance on the Site basics card - the llms.txt file, the XML sitemap and the robots.txt sitemap line - now shows the parts you need to change in bold and says so, the same way the fix suggestions on your analysis pages do. Paste the snippet, replace the bold parts with your own site name, pages and descriptions, and keep the rest as it is.
- New
Project pages
Open any project from the Projects list to see its analyses, tasks and tracked keywords in one place. You can also add a project straight from the Projects page - enter the website domain and its page is ready, with the Site basics check already running.
- New
The Keywords page now flags when Google ranks the wrong page
Set a target page for a tracked keyword and RankedContent now compares it with the page Google actually serves. When another of your pages ranks instead - or outranks the target you picked - the keyword detail page says exactly which page won and where, so two of your pages competing for the same search never goes unnoticed. From there, one click makes the ranking page the new target, or keep your choice and strengthen it through the Analyze button.
- Improved
Alert emails now celebrate wins - bundled into one daily email
Alert emails are now good news only, and at most one per day. When tracked keywords enter a new band on Google - the top 50, 40, 30, 20 or 10 - or an AI engine starts citing your site, every win from that day arrives together in a single daily wins email, sent only on days with wins and celebrating each milestone once. Ranking drops and lost citations moved to the Monday digest: search results rarely reward a fix within days, so the news arrives once a week with the full picture instead of interrupting you. On Mondays your wins lead the digest itself, so there is never more than one email in a day. The digest also got stricter about what counts as a drop worth reporting - small dips stay on the Keywords page.
- New
AI engine tracking: see if ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews cite your site
Keyword tracking now asks the AI engines themselves. Each tracked keyword gets a companion AI search query - generated for you based on real search demand and editable at any time. RankedContent runs the query through ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google, including its AI Overviews, and records what comes back: Was your brand mentioned? Was your site cited? Did the AI engine even visit your pages while researching its answer? The Keywords page turns those checks into a per-engine status - Cited, In rotation, In the pool, Mentioned only, Not visible, or No AI Overview when Google is not showing one - plus a visibility score, and each status points at the right next step: strengthen the page when you are in the pool but not cited, create content when the engine cannot see you. Rounding it out: instant email alerts for major ranking drops and for citations gained or lost, and the Monday digest now includes AI engine citation changes.
- Improved
Two sharper AEO/GEO score factors
The AEO/GEO score gained a new factor and a deeper one. Served content depth (new - also on the free score checker) verifies that the main content of your page actually arrives in the HTML your server sends: most AI engines read raw HTML and do not run JavaScript, so text rendered only in the browser is invisible to them. Organization schema now expects an enriched entity - besides the markup itself, at least two of logo, sameAs, contactPoint and address - and a failing row names exactly which properties are missing. Scores can shift slightly on re-analysis; every failing row comes with concrete guidance.
- New
The AI crawler checker now checks your brand entity
New card on the free AI Crawler Access Checker: Brand entity. We look your domain up on Wikidata - the machine-readable knowledge base behind Wikipedia, one of the heaviest grounding sources for AI answers - and report if a verified entity lists your domain as its official website, including a link to the entity and a note on its Wikipedia article. A verified entity lets AI engines confidently bind your brand name to your site; without one, they fall back on weaker signals.
- Improved
Site basics now checks your 404s
The Site basics card on your Projects page gained a fourth check: 404 hygiene. We fetch a made-up URL on your domain and verify it answers a real 404 status. If it answers 200 instead (a soft 404), crawlers cannot tell your real pages from junk - broken links linger in indexes and crawl budget gets wasted on nothing. A failing check comes with step-by-step How to fix guidance; hit Run checks on any project to see the new row.
- Improved
The AI crawler checker now watches 16 crawlers and runs three new checks
The free AI Crawler Access Checker got a big upgrade. It now evaluates 16 AI crawlers - including the newer search and on-demand fetchers behind Claude and Perplexity, plus the crawlers for Meta AI and Apple Intelligence - across eight answer engines. Three new cards join the report: 404 hygiene (does your site answer made-up URLs with a real 404, or quietly serve junk pages that can pollute what AI engines index), Sitemap (is a valid XML sitemap in place so crawlers can discover every page you want read), and Markdown for agents (an emerging convention where a site hands AI agents a clean markdown version of a page on request).
- Improved
Analysis failures now tell you where a redirect went
When a URL you analyze redirects somewhere else - most often to a login page - and that landing page has nothing to read, the failure message now says so and names the page we actually ended up on. Before, this could surface as a confusing note about JavaScript rendering. It usually means the address you entered doesn’t exist or needs a login, so you can spot the typo or the wrong link right away.
- Improved
A proper page for links that go nowhere
Mistyped or outdated rankedcontent.ai links now land on a real page instead of a bare browser error. It says plainly that the page doesn’t exist and offers two ways forward: back to the homepage, or straight into the free AEO/GEO Score Checker.
- New
See your plan at a glance
Settings now opens with a Your plan card: the plan you are on, how many analyses you have used, your keyword slots and projects, and what your plan includes. Trial accounts also see how many days are left. Need more room? The card links straight to us.
- New
Choose each keyword’s target page
Every keyword page now shows the target page - the page meant to win that search - and you can set or change it at any time, not just when adding the keyword. The Win this keyword card also got smarter about your credits: View analysis opens the results you already have for free, Analyze this page runs a fresh check when you have made changes, and re-analyzing clearly says it uses one analysis credit before you confirm.
- Improved
Keywords pages update themselves
No more reloading to see fresh data: after you add a keyword, the scoreboard refreshes itself as the first checks land, and returning to the tab pulls the latest results automatically. Run now and Pause moved out of the row menu into their own Tracking column, and the position cards on each keyword page now show when each device was last checked - even when a check has not found a ranking yet.
- Improved
You choose what gets tracked
Analyzing a page no longer adds its focus keyword to tracking automatically - a new "Track this keyword after the analysis" option on the analyze form puts that under your control. New projects now tell you about the brand keyword we start tracking for you, and the Keywords page has a Suggest button that proposes keywords for your site or a specific page.
- Improved
Failed checks now retry automatically all week
When a position check fails - a hiccup on the data side, not something you did - we now retry it automatically every day until it succeeds or the week ends, so a bad morning no longer costs you a whole week on the trend line. Gaps in your charts should now be rare; one that remains means the check kept failing for the entire week.
- Improved
Keywords are now case-insensitive
Google treats ‘What is AEO’ and ‘what is aeo’ as the same search, and now your keyword list does too. New keywords are saved in lowercase, and any existing pairs that differed only in capitalization have been merged into one keyword - with their full position history combined, so no data was lost.
- Improved
AI Crawler Checker: email your host in one click
When the free AI Crawler Access Checker finds a firewall or bot-protection layer answering instead of your site, fixing it is usually one support ticket away - so the result now includes an ‘Email this to your host’ button. It opens a prefilled email that explains the problem in plain language, lists the AI crawlers to allow, and links your diagnostic report; just add your host’s support address and send.
- New
Keyword tracking: weekly Google positions and AI Overview visibility
The new Keywords page tracks the searches you want to win. Every keyword is checked on Google weekly, on desktop and mobile: your position in the top 50, the page that actually ranks, a trend sparkline, and the AI Overview for that search - including if it cites your site. Analyzing a page with a focus keyword adds that keyword automatically, every row links straight back to Analyze, and Run now checks any keyword immediately - no waiting for the weekly schedule. Rounding it out: CSV downloads of your scoreboard and analysis history, and an optional Monday digest email summing up each project’s week. The interactive tutorial and the Help guide walk you through it step by step.
- New
Free tool: AEO/GEO Score Checker
A second free tool scores any public page the way our real analyzer does - readability, structured data, FAQ and heading structure, content freshness, statistics and more - and shows exactly which checks the full AI analysis adds. No sign-up needed, every result has a shareable link, and both free tools now live under ‘Free tools’ in the top menu.
- Improved
Share your AI crawler check results
Every result from the free AI Crawler Access Checker now has one-tap sharing - copy the link, use your device’s share sheet, or post directly to X or LinkedIn. Shared links unfurl with a live summary of the verdict (‘5 of 6 AI answer engines can read this site’), so the result travels with the URL. The checker is also easier to find: look for ‘Free tool’ in the top menu, try it right on the homepage, or use the link in the footer of every page.
- New
Free tool: AI Crawler Access Checker
A new free tool checks if the AI crawlers behind ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Google’s AI and Copilot can actually read your site. It evaluates your robots.txt crawler by crawler, looks for an llms.txt file, and detects when a firewall or bot-protection layer is answering instead of your pages - with plain-language fixes for anything it finds. No sign-up needed, and every result has a shareable link.
- New
Our crawler now has fixed IP addresses
RankedContentBot - the fetcher behind your analyses - now makes all its requests from a fixed, published IP range. If your website’s hosting or firewall only supports allow rules by IP address rather than by user agent, you (or your host) can now allowlist it in one step. The details, including the range itself, are on the ‘About our crawler’ page - linked from Help.
- Improved
Smarter handling when a page can’t be read
When a page briefly serves no readable content, the analyzer now waits and automatically retries before giving up. If it still can’t read the page, the failure message explains the likely causes - including when a site’s hosting or firewall is blocking automated visitors - and links to the ‘About our crawler’ page, which tells your hosting provider exactly how to allow RankedContent’s fetcher. You’ll also find that page linked from Help.
- Improved
Focus keyword is now optional at submit
You can now analyze a page without choosing a focus keyword - pick one of the suggestions, type your own, or submit without one. Skipping it simply skips the keyword-specific checks; you can always re-analyze with a keyword later.
- New
Projects and site basics
Your workspace is now organized into projects - one for each website you optimize. Every project has a new Site basics check that reviews the essentials AI answer engines rely on - AI crawler access, an llms.txt file, and an XML sitemap - with step-by-step fixes for anything that is missing. Find Projects in the sidebar.
- Improved
Fairer alt-text scoring for decorative images
The SEO alt-text check no longer penalizes decorative images that correctly use an empty alt attribute. Only images missing the attribute entirely, or carrying whitespace-only alt text, count against the score. Re-analyze a page to see the updated result.
- New
Blog
RankedContent has a blog now. The first post covers the launch, with guides on GEO, AEO, and classic SEO on the way - and every post runs through our own analyzer before it ships.
- New
Interactive tutorial
A guided walkthrough of the whole flow - submitting a page, reading your SEO and GEO scores, applying fixes, and working the task board - including a practice board you can drag cards around on. Find it in the sidebar after signing in.
- New
Waitlist and live queue status
You can now request access directly from the sign-up page. We also added a live status view for analyses that are briefly waiting for a slot during busy periods.
- Improved
Analyses are much faster
We re-engineered the analysis pipeline. Most pages now go from submitted to fully scored in about two minutes.
- New
RankedContent is live
RankedContent launched in private beta at rankedcontent.ai: SEO and GEO scoring for any page, with copy-paste-ready fixes and a prioritized task board.
- Improved
Grouped score breakdowns and a new look
Score pages now group every factor by priority - Critical, Recommended, Nice-to-have, and Already optimized - so you always know what to fix first. Shipped alongside a full visual refresh, including radial score gauges and a cleaner dashboard.