What is Ranking?
Verified 5 August 2026
A ranking function typically blends a relevance score with signals like link authority, freshness and page quality. Web search engines invest enormously here because the top three results receive nearly all attention.
Ranking assumes a reader who will look at the first result and stop if it is good. An agent consuming ten results pays for all ten, which is why for agent retrieval what gets *into* the result set matters more than the order within it.
Common questions
What is Ranking?
Ranking orders retrieved documents by predicted relevance, traditionally combining a text-matching score with query-independent quality signals.
How does Ranking work in practice?
Ranking assumes a reader who will look at the first result and stop if it is good. An agent consuming ten results pays for all ten, which is why for agent retrieval what gets *into* the result set matters more than the order within it.
See it working
The free tier is 10,000 requests a month with no card — enough to test any of this against your own queries.