Last updated: September 2026
Global rank: Worldwide · 2026-09
#17,059
AI visibility: Grade A
87
SEO health: Latest audit
89
Visits
19.6M
per month, estimated
Keywords
388.3K
ranking in Google
Organic share
100%
19.6M organic visits
LLMS.txt
Published
129 lines AI engines can read
You're seeing the free preview of sports-reference.com
sports-reference.com Web Traffic Statistics
Key findings
- Sports Reference (Sports, Fitness & Recreation) is ranked #17,059 worldwide in our September 2026 domain ranking, inside the top 100,000, up 515 places from #17,574 in August 2026.
- It is estimated to receive about 19.6 million visits a month from search, 100% of it organic, across 388,300 ranking keywords.
- Its AI visibility score is 87 out of 100 (grade A), with a published llms.txt of 129 lines.
- Its last technical audit scored 89/100, with "Add Meta Description" the highest-priority fix.
| Month | Rank | Move |
|---|---|---|
| September 2026 | #17,059 | ▲ 515 |
| August 2026 | #17,574 | ▼ 1,624 |
| July 2026 | #15,950 | ▲ 360 |
| June 2026 | #16,310 | — |
| May 2026 | #16,310 | ▲ 2,734 |
| April 2026 | #19,044 | ▲ 1,349 |
| March 2026 | #20,393 | ▲ 2,522 |
| February 2026 | #22,915 | — |
What this company does
Sports Reference runs a handful of sites that have become go-to places for anyone who wants real numbers on games and players. The main properties cover baseball, basketball, football, hockey and soccer with box scores, play-by-play logs and season totals going back decades. People use the data for fantasy teams, betting research, school projects or just settling arguments about old records. The company keeps everyth…
Our read on the site
The overall SEO health of sports-reference.com is strong, with high scores in accessibility and best practices. However, the site has critical gaps in meta descriptions and sitemap availability that could hinder its search visibility and user experience.
sports-reference.com Traffic and Visitor Engagement
sports-reference.com draws an estimated 19.6 million visits a month from search engines. Effectively all of it is organic — about 19.6 million visits from unpaid results. Spread across 388,300 ranking keywords, that averages roughly 51 organic visits per keyword.
Monthly visits
19.6M
Latest estimate
Change
No monthly history yet
It starts building from the first scan
Organic visits
19.6M
100% of all traffic
Paid visits
0
No paid search detected
Organic vs paid
100%
0%
We don't hold a month-by-month history for this domain yet.
The traffic dashboard builds one from the first scan onwards.
sports-reference.com AI Visibility
On our AI visibility scale sports-reference.com earns 87 of 100 points, a grade A. It takes full marks for LLMS.txt and Structured data. The biggest gap is Company profile, at 19 of 25 points (6/8 core fields), worth 6 points if closed. It also loses points on Crawlability (5/10) and SEO health (18/20).
Grade A
Scored from this domain's own data — llms.txt, profile completeness, technical health, crawlability and structured data.
Present
6/8 core fields
92/100
robots ✓ · sitemap ✗
Detected
Fix these first
- → Complete your company profile so AI answers about you stay accurate.
- → Add sitemap.xml so AI crawlers can read you.
sports-reference.com LLMS.txt
The llms.txt on sports-reference.com runs to 129 lines (4,796 characters) across 12 sections, last generated in May 2026. It introduces the site as "Sports Reference". It tells AI engines the business works in Sports Data, Statistics Platforms and Online Media. It describes 3 products, with prices such as Baseball-Reference at Free with premium options, Basketball-Reference at Free with premium options and Pro-Football-Reference at Free with premium options. Services it lists include Data Licensing and Custom Reports. The audience it names is Sports enthusiasts and professionals, aged 18-55 (Global). Technologies it mentions include PHP, MySQL and Custom CMS. The keywords it claims start with "sports stats", "baseball reference", "player statistics" and "historical scores".
Status
Published
AI engines can read it
Lines
129
In the file
Size
4.8K
Characters
Sections
12
Updated May 22, 2026
What the file says
# Sports Reference ## About Sports Reference runs a handful of sites that have become go-to places for anyone who wants real numbers on games and players. The main properties cover baseball, basketball, football, hockey and soccer with box scores, play-by-play logs and season totals going back decades. People use the data for fantasy teams, betting research, school projects or just settling arguments about old records. The company keeps everything free for casual visitors while offering premium tools and data feeds for serious users and media outlets. Their clean tables and simple search make it easy to pull up a player’s entire career in seconds. **Areas of Work:** Sports Data, Statistics Platforms, Online Media ## Things to Remember - **Website:** https://sports-reference.com - **Address:** - **Contact:** - **Phone:** - **Hours:** - **Timezone:** - **Currency:** - **Company Type:** Private - **Employees:** 11-50 - **Revenue:** Not Disclosed - **Hiring Status:** Not currently hiring ## Products - **Baseball-Reference** (Free with premium options): Complete baseball stats and history - **Basketball-Reference** (Free with premium options): NBA and college basketball numbers - **Pro-Football-Reference** (Free with premium options): NFL and college football data ## Services - **Data Licensing** (Contact for pricing): Bulk stats feeds for media and apps - **Custom Report
Sections in the file
Areas of work
Keywords it claims
Technologies
Products it tells AI about
- Baseball-ReferenceFree with premium options
- Basketball-ReferenceFree with premium options
- Pro-Football-ReferenceFree with premium options
Services it tells AI about
- Data LicensingContact for pricing
- Custom ReportsContact for pricing
Competitors it names
Audience it targets
Sports enthusiasts and professionals · 18-55 · Global
Company type
Private
sports-reference.com Organic Keywords
Google lists sports-reference.com for about 388,300 keywords, which together bring an estimated 19.6 million organic visits a month.
Ranking keywords
388.3K
Found in Google for this domain
Visits they bring
19.6M
Estimated organic visits a month
Top ranking keywords
No ranked-keyword data cached for this domain yet.
Ranked Keywords pulls the full list on its first run.
What it ranks for
sports-reference.com SEO Audit
The latest technical audit of sports-reference.com scored 89 out of 100 overall. Performance is its weakest area at 73, while accessibility scores highest at 96. The audit makes 12 recommendations in all, and 3 of the 4 listed first are rated high priority or critical.
Overall
SEO
Excellent
Performance
Accessibility
Excellent
Fix these first
- CriticalAdd Meta Description
- HighImplement Sitemap
- HighCreate Content for Identified Gaps
- MediumOptimize Internal Linking Structure
8 more recommendations, with the exact changes and the pages they apply to, are in the full report.
sports-reference.com Competitors and Alternatives
Sports Reference's company profile names espn.com, sports.yahoo.com, cbssports.com and foxsports.com as competitors. Its own llms.txt adds theathletic.com and bleacherreport.com. Outside its market, the domains ranked closest to it in our worldwide ranking are mocospace.com, adsmovil.com, microfocus.com and visiblemeasures.com.
sports-reference.com Company Profile
Sports Reference runs a handful of sites that have become go-to places for anyone who wants real numbers on games and players. The main properties cover baseball, basketball, football, hockey and soccer with box scores, play-by-play logs and season totals going back decades. People use the data for fantasy teams, betting research, school projects or just settling arguments about old records. The company keeps everyth…
Sports Reference was founded in 2000, about 26 years ago. Its workforce is listed as between 11 and 50 employees. Its profile files it under Sports, Fitness & Recreation, with further tags for Media, Entertainment & Gaming; Sports Data; and Statistics Platforms. Products on record for it: Baseball-Reference, Basketball-Reference, Pro-Football-Reference and Hockey-Reference. Total funding on record is Bootstrapped. Its tagline reads: "Sports stats and history you can trust".
- Sector
- Sports, Fitness & Recreation
- Founded
- 2000
- Employees
- 11-50
- Revenue
- Not Disclosed
- Funding
- Bootstrapped
- Products
- Baseball-Reference, Basketball-Reference, Pro-Football-Reference, Hockey-Reference
sports-reference.com Traffic by Country
Which markets this brand actually serves, and where the web links to it from.
Top customer markets
AI estimate · live webWe only measure visitor geography for domains whose analytics are connected to us. For everyone else this is read live from the web and shown as an estimate — never mixed in with the measured numbers.
No market breakdown available for this brand.
Where its backlinks come from
Measured. The country each linking site is hosted in — a real signal of which regions know this brand.
No backlink sample for this domain yet.
Backlink Analytics collects one on its first run.
sports-reference.com Backlink Analytics
Who vouches for this domain. Strong, varied links are still the clearest signal of authority — to search engines and to AI engines that cite sources.
We haven't run a backlink crawl for sports-reference.com yet, so there are no link counts to show. Backlink Analytics builds the profile on its first run and it appears here after that.
—
links on file
Companies ranked next to sports-reference.com
Neighbours of #17,059 in our worldwide ranking — each with its own report.
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