Keyword Ranking API

As we support horizontal and vertical positioning, the API will also automatically tell you whether a particular type of result is not only visible but also above or below the fold. This is crucially important for assessing why a top organic result may not be getting the CTR (click through rates) you expect it to achieve, because you may have some organic rankings that have been pushed ‘beyond the fold’ (i.e. they require the user to scroll down to see them) by other types of results above them. In order to work this out, we work from a standard browser size, as follows:

User Agent Browser Dimensions

pc 1920×1080

mac 1920×1080

tablet 768×1024

ipad 768×1024

iphone 375×667

mobile 375×667

The above the fold value is then calculated by checking if the element’s top left coordinates’ vertical position is less than the size of the browser window.

It will not surprise anyone to see PPC ads cropping up in the SERPs when the phrase has any sort of commercial intent, as PPC is still Google’s main source of revenue. For those of you who want to track all PPC ads appearing in the SERPS, then you’ll be pleased to hear that we also show you the details for the adverts that Google puts towards the bottom of the page, the API will let you know when and where we see adverts, e.g. Whether they appear at the top of page 1 or the bottom of page 3. You’ll notice that we simply differentiate between the two through the use of an “on_top” property:

If you’re developing a PPC campaign management platform or just building an SEM dashboard and need both PPC and SEO data, then hopefully you should find this useful.

AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) have become a slightly controversial topic within the SEO community over the past year, but regardless of what you think about the benefits or drawbacks of implementing support for AMP, they are a reflection of Google catering for the fact that most searches online are now carried out using mobile devices (phones, tablets, etc). Usually, you will only see these types of results for mobile searches. Therefore, you would need to specify a mobile user agent in your API request.

Google has been providing ‘direct answers’ to queries in various forms for some time now and often in such an informative way that the answer presented initially at the top of the SERPs is sufficient to answer the initial question, so a user doesn’t always have to then navigate to a particular website. At Authoritas we track all the different SERPs Answer Box results including lists, paragraphs and tables.

These Answer Boxes come in several forms, but amongst the most common is the ‘list’ type, which will either show as an ordered (numbered) or unordered (bulleted) list. Here’s an example of the former:

And here’s an example of the bulleted type:

For some queries, however, Google will return a direct answer that looks awfully like a paragraph and this is sometimes the case even if the linked content is actually displayed as a list. This will show as “type” => “paragraph” in the JSON response.

For some direct answer results, you’ll see what is obviously a table at the top of the SERPS. These can vary slightly from query to query, as you can see from the following examples:

Authoritas has added support for detecting Articles in the SERPs API. This means you will now be able to distinguish between News articles, or Top Stories, and Articles.

Since February 2020, we can pull in all the information you need when it comes to books in the Knowledge Panel. You can retrieve the title, description and URL.

Since January 2020, we are now able to parse currency converter results in our API.

Since December 2019, we have been able to retrieve destination titles, descriptions and images.

We are constantly working on new features to add to the SERPs API. We can also track dictionary definition results.

This is what dictionary looks like in the SERPs:

As of January 2020, our API can also track events within the Google SERPs.

The SERPs look like:

The frequently asked question results allows users to easily access important questions from your site. With our SERPs API you can find out if your site is ranking for FAQs.

The API has been picking up on normal video results for a while now, but Google will occasionally highlight the most relevant video result as a featured video at the top of the results page. You typically only see this type of result on page 1 of the SERPS. Here’s an example:

And here are the JSON response you’ll get from our API (not the “featured” property set to “true”):

Gather all the details from the flight finder SERPs with the Authoritas API.

Pull the hotel name, type and URL from the SERPs with the Authoritas API.

At Authoritas we also pull in the image details including the image URL.

At Authoritas have updated our API to pull in Interesting Finds data.

The API can pull in all information including description of the job, where it is, salary amount and location of the job results in the SERPs.

For some queries, Google will return a ‘knowledge panel’ or a ‘knowledge graph’ based result. This typically appears on the right-hand side of the SERPS. Here’s a good example of that when just searching for ‘Barack Obama’:

Scrape the news results with the Authoritas API.

For some queries, Google will also display “related questions” other users made for similar queries:

This section of the SERPs is often shown above the fold (on a desktop search anyway) and, just like “related searches” (below), gathering this information can be useful as part of your keyword research tasks when conducting a digital marketing campaign. You’ll see this broken out in the JSON response under “people_also_ask: {}”.

Discover which local business listings appear in the SERPs.

Pull in the description, title, image and URL of any recipe in the SERPs.

Google allows users to refine their results. This feature is at the bottom of the search results page and above the related searches section.

Depending on the query, Google also pulls in “how to guides” and other “guides” to help users with their search. For example in this example Google shows users blog posts and guides about how to  choose the perfect wardrobe when they search for “buy wardrobe”.

Similar to the above “related questions” or “people also ask” results you see in Google, you will normally always see a “related searches” section towards the bottom of the SERPs, just above the pagination section. You can also use this data as a useful addition to any Keyword Research you are carrying out during a campaign. The relevant part of the JSON response will look like this:

Pull in the reviews for different products or services.

Pull in the title, merchant and URL, info, price and the location of the product within the SERPs.

Sitelinks can be an indication that Google considers a website to be owned by a recognised brand. They help to expand the size of a website’s organic listing, so can be useful to have, but you will need to implement Schema.org mark-up in order to make use of these.

Google will sometimes return tweets as part of the SERPS results, although this is more likely when a user is searching for something quite topical. A good way to see this in action is to use a Twitter hashtag when googling. Here is a recent example:

The Authoritas API pulls in sports results including sport type, phrase, date and region.

As of January 2020, we can now track stock prices in our SERPs API.

This is how it looks like in the SERPs:

January was a busy month and we have also released translations within the API:

Translations gives immediate results without the user having to click through to a site:

This is a relatively recent addition to the SERPS by Google and is a good example of how Google is trying to provide its users with quick and detailed answers. Obviously, this data originates from and links to Google Maps.

Google thinks the user intent is of paramount importance to us as SEOs if we want to rank for a bunch of relevant terms around that intent. For this reason, we have built a classification model that analyses Google’s search intent as a proxy for user intent. Earlier this year, we launched the beta launch of our user intent features.  This means for every single keyword ranking check, we analyse the make-up of the first full page of the SERP (and ignore the rest of the top 100 results).  We look at the prominence and order of the organic and paid SERP results, the Universal SERP results featured, the navigational elements and the types of ranking sites.  This allows us to develop a user intent model that works in the markets Google serves irrespective of language.

At Authoritas we can also parse video serps.

By “Visibility”, we simply mean whether the SERP feature is visible to a user when they first reach that page, i.e. It doesn’t require any interaction to see it (other than scrolling up or down). So usually this will apply to news, tweets, images, shopping or any other type of result for which Google generates a left-right carousel.

In the above examples on this page, we know (and report) X news results, but only some of them are initially visible to a user unless that user clicks on the chevron on the right-hand side of the screen to get the carousel to scroll right and show more results. It is useful to use this in conjunction with the Above the Fold analysis mentioned above to determine whether a Universal SERP feature that you may be ranking for is above the fold of the page and visible to users.

Pull in all the weather details including description, location and URL.