Why your rankings are not everybody's rankings
Search engines personalise heavily. Location changes results at the country, region and often city level; search history changes them again; device class changes them a third time. Checking a keyword in your own browser tells you where you rank for someone exactly like you, in exactly your town, with exactly your history.
Worse, an office that checks rankings all day teaches the search engine what it wants to see, and then starts getting rate-limited or shown a challenge, which quietly poisons the data rather than stopping it.
Tracking a market properly
- Query from inside the country you are trying to rank in, on a residential address, not from head office.
- Strip personalisation — no cookies carried between checks, and rotate the address so no history accumulates.
- Fix the language and device you are measuring, and keep them fixed. Mobile and desktop are different rankings, and comparing across them silently is a common reporting error.
- Check on a schedule, not on demand, so week-on-week movement means something.
What rank tracking costs in traffic
| Keywords | Frequency | Traffic per month | Cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| 100 | Daily | ~1.2 GB | under $2 |
| 1,000 | Daily | ~12 GB | ~$10 |
| 1,000, three countries | Daily | ~36 GB | ~$25 |
| 5,000 | Weekly | ~9 GB | ~$8 |
Assumes about 400 KB per results page. Fetching only the first page, and only the HTML, keeps it at that; rendering the whole thing in a browser multiplies it several times over.
The other SEO jobs proxies solve
Rank tracking is the obvious one, but the same credential covers crawling your own site as an outside visitor rather than as an allow-listed office address, checking whether a competitor serves different content to search engines than to people, and verifying that hreflang and geo-redirects actually send a Spanish visitor to the Spanish page.
Common questions
Why do I need proxies for rank tracking?
Search results are personalised by location, history and device. Checking from your own browser measures your own rankings, not your market's, and an office that checks all day gets rate-limited or challenged.
How much traffic does rank tracking use?
Roughly 400 KB per results page, so a thousand keywords checked daily for a month is about 12 GB — near $10. Fetching only the first page and only the HTML keeps it there.
Can I track rankings in a specific country?
Yes — query from an address in that country. We cover 50+, and the country is a field on the credential, so one plan tracks several markets.
Rotating or sticky for SEO tracking?
Rotating. Each check should be independent, with no history carried between them, which is exactly what rotation gives you.
Try it before you pay for it
Connect Telegram and we credit 1 GB to your account — enough to measure your own traffic use on your own targets rather than trusting the numbers above. After that it is $0.70–$2.00 per gigabyte depending on volume, traffic never expires, and there is no monthly fee.