Long before Amazon would slap the Alexa name on the company’s ever-growing number of speech-powered home assistants, the company’s best-known product with that moniker was Alexa Internet: a web-ranking service that was the go-to tool for early internet pioneers looking to get their sites to rank on search. It was considered a trailblazer back when Amazon acquired the service in 1999. But in 2021, the original Alexa is still up and kicking — the same way that a search engine like Yahoo!, is up and kicking — but it’s more of a relic than anything else.
And it won’t be around much longer. Amazon announced on Thursday it would be shuttering the service on May 1st of next year, roughly 26 years after the company was first founded. Amazon didn’t offer a rationale behind the decision, choosing instead to keep the announcement short and sweet:
Twenty-five years ago, we founded Alexa Internet. After two decades of helping you find, reach, and convert your digital audience, we’ve made the difficult decision to retire Alexa.com on May 1, 2022. Thank you for making us your go-to resource for content research, competitive analysis, keyword research, and so much more.
The announcement goes on to note that Alexa’s already stopped offering new subscriptions (in fact, those got cut off yesterday) and that anyone with existing subs will keep on having access up until the shut-down on May 1st, 2022. After that, the only thing those customers will be able to do is export their preexisting traffic data off the platform. So, if that data is important to you, start exporting.
Granted, there might not be too many of those OG Alexa-fans left. Others have pointed out that the traffic numbers for Alexa’s own site, Alexa.com, have been on a steady decline over the past decade, dwindling from tens of millions per month in 2013 to just a fraction of those figures today. Amazon’s never been particularly shy about shelving products that weren’t up to snuff — and frankly, the company seems more concerned about the Alexa’s living in our homes than the Alexa stuck living in the annals of the internet.