What's My PageRank?

For years, "What's my PageRank?" was the first question a new site owner asked. A single green bar, numbered 0 to 10, promised to tell you how much Google respected your website. This site was originally a free tool that answered that question. Today it is something more useful: a clear, independent archive of what PageRank actually was, why the public number no longer exists, and how site authority is really measured now.

The green 0–10 bar above is a decorative reproduction of the old Google Toolbar gauge. It is not a live reading of any website — public PageRank scores stopped updating in 2013 and Google removed the metric entirely in 2016.

The short answer: nobody can check your PageRank anymore

If you came here to look up a website's PageRank, here is the honest truth up front: you can't, and neither can anyone else. The public-facing number that made this tool useful was called Toolbar PageRank. Google stopped refreshing it in December 2013 and shut it down for good in early 2016. Every "PageRank checker" still online today is either showing you a frozen decade-old value or simply making a number up.

Rather than fake a result, this resource explains the real picture. PageRank as an idea is still one of the foundations of how search engines work. What disappeared was the little green scoreboard, not the concept behind it.

What you'll find here

We've turned the old toolset into a set of plain-English guides. Each one takes a feature this site used to offer and explains the topic behind it, then brings it up to date for how search works now.

• What is PageRank? — the algorithm, the 0–10 scale, and the "random surfer" idea in language anyone can follow.
• The history of PageRank — from a 1996 Stanford research project called BackRub to the day Google switched the public score off.
• The PageRank checker — how single-URL lookups worked, why they stopped, and how to evaluate a page today.
• PageRank display badges — the embeddable green badges that once dotted the web, and what site owners show now.
• Fake PageRank — the redirect trick that let shady sites borrow someone else's score, and how to spot fake authority today.
• What replaced PageRank — a vendor-neutral tour of the third-party authority metrics people use now.

Why this still matters

PageRank changed the web. Before it, search engines mostly counted how often your keyword appeared on a page, which was trivially easy to game. Larry Page and Sergey Brin's insight — that a link is a kind of vote, and votes from trusted pages should count for more — made results dramatically better and launched Google. Understanding that idea is still the fastest way to understand why some websites rank and others don't. You can read the original thinking in the founders' 1998 Stanford paper, The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine.

Is PageRank gone for good?

The public score is gone for good — Google has shown no sign of ever bringing back a visible number, and the incentives that made it a magnet for manipulation haven't changed. But the underlying idea is very much alive. Search engines still analyse links to help judge which pages deserve trust; they're just far more sophisticated about it, and they no longer publish a single figure for anyone to game. So the honest modern answer to "what's my PageRank?" isn't a number at all — it's a richer, more reliable picture of your site's authority, which is exactly what this archive helps you build.

Start here

If you're new to the topic, begin with What is PageRank? and then read What replaced PageRank to see how the same ideas live on. If you actually need to size up a website today, jump straight to our practical guide, How to check a website's authority. Everything here is free, independent, and vendor-neutral — no score to sell, and nothing to sign up for.