Alexa rank: A script to get the rank for any site (1,926 views)

What is Alexa rank?

Alexa collects statistics about visits by internet users to websites through the Alexa Toolbar. Based on the collected data, Alexa computes site ranking. By examining the Alexa rank of a site, you can get a rough idea of how popular the site is. Many argue that Alexa rank is misleading but it has its uses.

The Alexa rank script

You can find out the Alexa rank for any site by using this page. However, if you want to programatically get the Alexa rank, you can do it using this script.

Get the Alexa rank script

Using the script

After downloading the script, give it execute permission by doing this. You will need to have Python installed.

chmod +x get_alexa_rank.py

$ ./get_alexa_rank.py google.com
popularity rank = 2
reach_rank = 1
 
$ ./get_alexa_rank.py wikipedia.com
popularity rank = 7
reach_rank = 6
 
$ ./get_alexa_rank.py blog.prashanthellina.com
popularity rank = 557287
reach_rank = 482289
 
$ ./get_alexa_rank.py www.inexistantsite.com
popularity rank = -1
reach_rank = -1

How does the script work?

If you make a http request for the following url,

http://data.alexa.com/data?cli=10&dat=snbamz&url=$URL

after replacing $URL with the url of the site for which you need the Alexa rank, the following XML response is sent out. I tried with “http://blog.prashanthellina.com”.

<ALEXA VER="0.9" URL="blog.prashanthellina.com/" HOME="0" AID="=">
<RLS PREFIX="http://" more="0">
</RLS>
	<SD TITLE="A" FLAGS="">
<POPULARITY URL="prashanthellina.com/" TEXT="557287"/>
<RANK DELTA="+70225"/>
<REACH RANK="482289"/>
</SD>
</ALEXA>

The script parses the XML response and extracts POPULARITY/@TEXT and REACH/@RANK.

If you are looking for a PHP script for doing the same, check this out.