The gold standard for measuring SEO success

Yes – and that's precisely what makes it so valuable. SISTRIX calculates the Visibility Index across more than 50 countries using identical methodology: in every market, the same number of visibility points is distributed among the ranking domains. A Visibility Index of 10 means the same visibility in every country. Because market sizes and search volumes differ, the same value translates into a different number of visitors – but the comparability of visibility itself is always guaranteed.

SISTRIX uses two types of event pins. Global pins mark major Google updates in blue – the ones that can be objectively detected across many domains in our data. They appear automatically as soon as a value changes by at least 15.5 percentage points and 0.05 points in absolute terms at the same time. Personal pins are created by you – they are shown in green, visible only in your account and follow the same thresholds. If you assign a domain to a personal pin, it stays permanently visible in that domain's chart.

Google sometimes delivers different rankings on desktop and smartphone – especially when a website is not optimised for mobile. That's why SISTRIX measures both worlds separately and provides a dedicated Visibility Index for desktop and smartphone search results. At a glance, you see how strong your domain is on the device that handles the majority of all search queries today.

The Visibility Index is not a lever – it's a result: more and better rankings on relevant keywords push it up. The fastest route there is the competitor analysis in SISTRIX. Look at which formats are working for your competitors, derive your own SEO strategy from that and execute it. Every ranking you win measurably feeds into your Visibility Index.

A good value is always relative – relative to the competition in your market. Compare yourself to the strongest and weakest players in your industry and find your position in between. Use the competitor feature in SISTRIX, or set up your own keyword list and identify your competitors via the domains that rank for those terms. That gives you a realistic picture instead of an abstract target value.

The Visibility Index measures SEO success – independently, comparably and stable over years. Google Search Console, by contrast, provides demand-driven web analytics data for your own property and has no notion of competitors or historical market comparisons. The two tools complement each other but pursue different goals and rely on different methodologies. For strategic SEO decisions and a view of the whole market, there's no way around SISTRIX.

Because the Visibility Index measures SEO success, only organic Google results feed into the calculation. Ads and other non-organic boxes are excluded. When Google pushes an organic result aside with one of its own integrations, we attribute the corresponding visibility points to an internal, virtual domain. This makes it transparent how much space Google itself takes up in the search results – a detail that makes the Visibility Index particularly precise.

By default, the SEO > Hostnames and SEO > Directories reports show the three strongest hosts or directories in the history chart. To compare more of them, first click the host or directory you're interested in within the list – you'll land on its overview page with its own Visibility Index history. Via the options button in the top right of the chart, choose "Compare chart" and add as many additional hosts or directories as you like for a direct graphical comparison.