This is probably super obvious to most of you but this may be the first time I've heard Google comment about this. Amazon has this Alexa rank feature, they had it since like 1996, a super long time. Google's John Mueller was asked if Google uses it for ranking sites and he obviously said no.
This is at Alexa.com, not to be confused with Amazon Alexa digital assistants, but owned by the same company.
Here are the tweets:
No.
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) August 12, 2019
Pretty clear - right?
It goes on:
Make something that users will find awesome. Alexa rank doesn't impress users.
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) August 12, 2019
and on...
Just writing the same thing as others doesn't provide new value, it doesn't create something users will find awesome.
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) August 12, 2019
The funny thing is, when I made my April fools prank in 2003 or so for the Google PageRank Prediction tool, I used Amazon's Alexa rank as part of the algorithm to figure out what your next PageRank score will be. I have no idea if this tool works anymore by the way - it never really did work because it was a prank.
Forum discussion at Twitter.