Amazon to shut down Alexa.com ranking site in May
Amazon announced that it will retire its Alexa.com ranking site on May 1, 2022. The site has operated for approximately 25 years, having been acquired by Amazon in 1999 for $250 million.
Alexa.com's primary products have always been its global traffic and ranking indexes, tracking various stats for more than 30 million websites. Tracking was accomplished via a combination of allied browser extensions and an installable Alexa script that site admins could add to their pages to support tracking.
Alexa.com was a well-known tool for keeping track of a particular site's performance long before search engine rankings became prevalent. Its modern catalogue of services includes options for viewing factors like bounce rates, duration of average visits to a given site, comparisons of the relative popularity of two or more tracked sites, and more.
While Amazon did not provide a reason for its decision to shut down the Alexa.com service, priorities among site operators have likely shifted away from its services and towards SEO considerations and search engine rankings, resulting in a drop in usership.
The company noted that it had ceased accepting new Alexa.com subscriptions as of December 8, 2021, and will bill existing subscribers for the final time on April 1, 2022. All available data will remain accessible until the aforementioned sunset date on May 1.
Users interested in exporting any of that data before the date can learn how to do so by visiting the site's support page. Site Overview, Top Sites, and Certified Site Metrics data parcels are all available to be downloaded via Alexa's own Content Exploration Tool, Site Audit reports, and several other methods.