Enter your domain, up to five keywords and a country. You get the live Google position and the ranking URL for each keyword, and the SERP features sitting above you.
Type your domain without http or www, paste up to five keywords, one per line, and pick the country you want to check. Press Check rankings. Each keyword is looked up in live Google results for that country on desktop, down to position 100, and the table shows where your site appears and with which page. Keywords you are not found for say so. The top three domains are listed for context, and the SERP features present, such as AI Overviews and People Also Ask, are flagged. You get five checks a day.
Search Console shows average positions over days and mixes every query variant together. A rank check shows where one page stands for one keyword right now, in one country, which is what you need when you have just published, just updated or just lost traffic. It also shows what is above you. A page at position 4 under an AI Overview, a video carousel and three ads gets a fraction of the clicks a position 4 got two years ago, and knowing that changes what you write next.
It reads a live, unpersonalised desktop search result for the country you choose, which is the same thing a rank tracking tool reads. Your own browser shows personalised, localised results, so your position will differ from what you see when you search yourself.
Search Console averages positions across every query, device, country and day in the range you picked. This tool checks one keyword, one country, on desktop, once. Both are right; they measure different things.
Weekly is enough for most sites, daily during a migration or after a major update. Distribb tracks every keyword in your plan daily and shows the trend, so you can stop checking by hand.