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Getting started with the API

Create a least-privilege Rankability API key, make your first Agent API request, and choose the right endpoint family.

Use the Rankability Agent API to connect external reporting tools, automations, AI assistants, and internal systems to your Rankability workspace. This guide covers the shared setup for every API family.

Before you begin

You need:

  • An active paid Rankability subscription.

  • A workspace owner or admin to create the API key.

  • A server-side application or secure automation environment. Do not expose an API key in browser code.

All customer Agent API endpoints start with:

https://app.rankability.com/api/agent/v1

Current responses include X-API-Version: 1.8.0. There is no separate /v2 namespace.

1. Create a least-privilege key

  1. Open organization Settings.

  2. Select API keys.

  3. Select Create API key.

  4. Give the key a name that identifies its integration.

  5. Select only the scopes the integration needs.

  6. Set an expiration when the integration is temporary.

  7. Copy the secret when Rankability displays it.

The full secret is shown once. Store it in a secrets manager or protected server environment. Rankability stores a hash and cannot reveal the secret later.

See Authentication and API scopes before granting write or run permissions.

2. Make a read-only request

Create a key with clients:read, then list the clients visible to your organization:

A successful response is organization-scoped and includes pagination:

Inspect these response headers while developing:

  • X-API-Version — the current Agent API contract version.

  • X-Request-Id — the identifier to include when reporting a failed request.

  • X-RateLimit-Limit, X-RateLimit-Remaining, and X-RateLimit-Reset — the current key-level request allowance.

3. Choose the correct API family

Goal
Start with

Resolve the active allowance or credit contract

GET /api/agent/v1/usage in API credits, rate limits, and errors

Research keyword opportunities

Score one existing page against search competitors

Run and inspect a full-site technical audit

Fetch pages or extract structured facts

Read tracking results or start a tracking scan

Create content jobs

Run a scored page audit

Query Google and AI-search results directly

Connect an AI assistant over MCP

Read the published in-app KB dataset

Use API use cases and integration patterns if you need help choosing between related surfaces.

4. Handle synchronous and asynchronous work differently

Some endpoints, including Optimize, Scrape, and Extract, return their result in the same request. They may still take longer than an ordinary database read.

Researcher jobs, Tracker scans, Site Auditor crawls, Page Auditor audits, content jobs, and bounded crawls are asynchronous. For those operations:

  1. Store the returned job, run, project, or audit ID.

  2. Poll the documented read endpoint with backoff.

  3. Stop at the documented terminal status.

  4. Read the returned error and billing fields before retrying.

5. Prepare for limits and failures

Current Rankability plans allow 30, 60, or 120 requests per minute per key for Core, Scale, and Agency respectively. Existing full-platform plans currently allow 60. Your response headers are authoritative; do not infer the limit from a plan name. Crawler operations also enforce daily page quotas, and some job families enforce concurrency limits.

Do not blindly retry write or run requests. Send Idempotency-Key where the endpoint supports it, store created IDs, and check whether the first request succeeded before creating another operation.

Continue with API credits, rate limits, and errors.

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