Twenty-Five years ago Alexa was a great way to help you keep up with the competition, through an intricate ranking system. The Alexa website would rank websites based on who got the most traffic.

Even a few porn sites landed on their list of most popular websites – pornhub for example was the 82nd most popular website in the world, while Chaturbate came in at #47.

Alexa was founded in 1996.  The name was chosen in homage to the Library of Alexandria of Ptolemaic Egypt, drawing a parallel between the largest repository of knowledge in the ancient world and the potential of the Internet to become a similar store of knowledge.

Alexa.com was acquired by Amazon in 1999 for an amazing $250 million.

Amazon will retire the ranking system on May 1, 2022. They have also stopped offering new subscriptions to their service as of yesterday, December 8th. Customers with existing subscriptions will continue to have access to their subscriptions until May 1, 2022.

Amazon has not added any further information on why it is closing Alexa.com, but there are at least two main reasons why. First, the obvious fact that the “other” Alexa needs to live on its own domain name and has grown big enough to justify this.

Secondly, Alexa, the internet service provider, now operates in a super-competitive marketplace where the likes of Similarweb, Ahref, SEMrush, Moz, AWR, and other rank checking services and SEO tools offer more comprehensive services at an aggressively fast cadence.

At the end of the day, Alexa has done its time, and after 25 years, it deserves to be sunset. The Alexa Rating no longer means anything – the Google Trends graph highlights this better than anything else.