In 2014, Google officially announced the discontinuation of its PageRank toolbar, which had been a key feature for webmasters and SEO professionals since its launch. This decision marked the end of public access to PageRank scores, which previously allowed users to see a numerical value representing a webpage's authority and link popularity.

The Open PageRank initiative was established to reintroduce PageRank metrics, enabling easy comparisons between different domains. This is achieved using open-source data from Common Crawl and Common Search.

The Common Crawl dataset consists of petabytes of data collected since 2007, encompassing nearly 250 billion web pages, with an addition of 3-5 billion pages each month. Although this volume is smaller than that of many leading backlink providers, the data is freely accessible to everyone. As a result, we have chosen to utilize this information to make PageRank data available to the public at no cost, indefinitely.