The protocol: how a reading is taken

The instrument

Readings come from Ahrefs' SERP overview for Ireland. This is a stored snapshot the tool holds, not a live search performed at the moment of reading. That choice is deliberate and it has a cost, and both are stated here rather than buried: a stored snapshot is reproducible and comparable between dates, but it is one remove from what any individual person sees.

Nothing is read from a personal browser. A signed-in browser personalises results, and a log built from personalised results measures the reader rather than the market.

What counts as one reading

One query, read once, on one date. Six queries therefore produce six readings, and one observation is the set of readings taken on the same date. A query that returns nothing produces a null reading, which is recorded as a null rather than as an absence.

What is recorded

For every result the tool returns: its position, its type, and its domain. Where the tool reports them, the domain rating and the estimated monthly traffic of the ranking page. Question boxes are recorded by their text. Map results are recorded as map results, and their order within the pack is recorded as reported.

Full page titles are not recorded in the tables. They are noisy, they change without the ranking changing, and reproducing competitors' marketing copy is not the purpose of a log. Where a title is materially interesting, it is described in words on the note pages.

What is not recorded

Anything the instrument does not report. The log does not estimate, interpolate or fill gaps. A field the tool leaves empty is printed empty, which is why several domain-rating cells in the first observation are blank rather than zero.

Rules that keep readings comparable

Same instrument, same country, same query wording. A change to any of the three starts a new series and is dated.

No re-reads for a better number. If a reading is retaken, both are kept and the reason is stated.

No editing the watch set downward.

Corrections are additive. An error is corrected by a later entry that names the earlier one, never by a silent edit. The corrections page holds the log of those.

Cadence

Every four weeks. A single reading says what one snapshot contained and nothing more; the earliest date any statement about movement could honestly be made is the second reading, and even then it would describe a difference between two snapshots rather than a trend.