Alexa

Leading provider of website ranking and traffic measurement data

Alexa Internet, Inc. was founded in 1996 as a web navigation and analytics company that became best known for its Alexa Rank, a metric that measured website popularity based on traffic data. The company was acquired by Amazon in 1999 for approximately $250 million and operated as an Amazon subsidiary for over two decades. Alexa provided web traffic data, global rankings, and competitive intelligence tools that were widely used by marketers, SEO professionals, and website owners to benchmark performance and analyze competitors. Alexa's core offering included the Alexa Toolbar, which collected browsing data from users, and various subscription-based analytics products that provided insights into website traffic, audience demographics, search analytics, and competitive benchmarking. The service became a standard reference point in the digital marketing and AdTech industries, with the Alexa Rank being frequently cited as a measure of website authority and reach. On December 8, 2021, Amazon announced that Alexa.com would be retired, and the service was officially shut down on May 1, 2022. Amazon cited the desire to focus resources on other areas as the reason for discontinuation. The shutdown marked the end of one of the internet's longest-running web analytics services, leaving a gap in the market for free and accessible website ranking data that had been relied upon by millions of users worldwide.