Why is Amazon shutting down Alexa in 2022?

Last month, Amazon had announced its “difficult” decision to “retire” Alexa.com on May 1, 2022. Thankfully, Alexa.com and your friendly voice assistant Alexa, are not the same.

Web fanatics would recall Alexa as a divine gift when the World Wide Web was in its infancy stage. It was founded in 1996, offering online traffic monitoring services based on data collected from customers who installed Alexa’s toolbar for their browser. Alexa eventually abandoned the toolbar in favour of browser extensions and various ways for determining website traffic statistics.

However, the most famous aspect of Alexa was its Global Rank, which ranked the most popular websites in the world based on traffic statistics. When mentioning how popular a website has grown, media outlets around the world frequently utilised Alexa’s Global Rank. Website owners would compare their ranking with competitors and increase advertising rates if their rankings were higher.

Amazon purchased Alexa Internet and the Alexa.com domain in 1999, almost 15 years before they launched Alexa the voice assistant.

Visitors to the website noticed an announcement by Amazon which said, “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.”

Amazon has not yet mentioned if it plans to merge the web ranking tool with any other service or repack it as a new tool. For the techies out here, time to search for an alternative or create one.

For the non-techie-mere-mortals, we will still have Alexa, the voice assistant, to order around.