Who ranks for animals: seven sites, just over twelve months
One Site Outranks Six on Rat. Most of That Lead Is Articles.
On rat, one site ranks about 24 places above the other six. Most of that lead is question articles. Take the articles out on both sides and it's still about 14 places ahead. On snake, it loses.
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What We Measured
Just over twelve months of Google Search Console data, Sept. 13, 2025 through Sept. 16, 2026, across seven pest control company websites, all of them Cube clients. We audit our own book in public. Just under three million rows. All seven cover the whole year. Sites that became clients partway through it are left out.
All seven are pest control companies. All seven have a wildlife division. Six add animal pages to a site built for pest. One has a separate page for every animal it removes. We call it the page-per-animal site. It's the rebuild site from the first report, and its owner now leads with general pest work. Every site in the set gets searched for animals.
We counted only the searches where somebody wanted the problem solved. We dropped the searches that read as questions or do-it-yourself, and kept the ones that name a service or a problem. The filter works on the search, not the page. So a service-worded search can still land on an article, and on rat, most of the page-per-animal site's counted times shown do.
Position, Not Volume
This page compares average position and nothing else.
Volume is the wrong number for this comparison. One site is much larger than the others. Before its May 2026 rebuild, about nine of every ten of its Google clicks came from articles, and the rebuild fell inside the window. It's the same site as the rebuild report. Pest was already the larger half of that business, and after the rebuild the owner turned the site toward general pest. Its search visits rose 35% over October through August against the same months a year earlier, and August 2026 was down 64% on August 2025. It still out-ranks the other six on most animals, on the pooled average. Any impression total would measure those three things more than it measures the point.
Position is comparable. It answers one question: when a person searches this animal, how far down the results does this site sit?
On the pooled average, the page-per-animal site ranks higher on all seven animals in this table. Site by site, it holds on rat and mouse: none of the other six with more than 500 times shown ranks above it there. General rodent is closer. Two of the six rank above it on those searches.
| Animal | The page-per-animal site | The other six | Sites reached, of six |
|---|---|---|---|
| Rat | 6.1 | 29.9 | 6 |
| Mouse | 11.1 | 34.5 | 6 |
| Mole | 11.0 | 33.5 | 6 |
| Rodent, general | 19.5 | 25.8 | 6 |
| Wildlife, general | 23.0 | 41.6 | 6 |
| Squirrel | 19.4 | 30.6 | 6 |
| Bat | 28.0 | 53.5 | 5 |
Position 6 is on the first page. Position 30 is roughly the bottom of the third, and ads, which Google doesn't count as a position, sit above both. Between those two numbers is where the clicks fall off.
Where the Rat Lead Comes From
The rat row needs a second look, because most of it isn't the animal pages.
Of the page-per-animal site's 107,503 counted rat times shown, 87% land on its question articles, like whether a dead rat keeps other rats away. Those articles average position 5.0. Its other rat pages, its rodent service pages, homepage and city pages, average 13.8.
The other six average 29.9 on rat, and only about one in ten of their counted rat times shown land on articles. Leave the articles out on both sides, 13.8 against 27.6, and the page-per-animal site still sits about fourteen places ahead on rat. The articles take it the rest of the way. On mouse, about three in five of its counted times shown land on articles.
What this page can say is that the site that ranks higher does it mostly through articles on rat, and that its other rat pages still out-rank the six. We haven't split mouse the same way. It can't say the animal pages alone did it.
Two Rows Run the Other Way, and Two That Don't
We're printing this because a table where every line favors the argument is a table somebody filtered.
On clean data, the other six win snake and gopher, the first two rows below. Raccoon and bird follow, and the page-per-animal site wins both.
| Animal | The page-per-animal site | The other six | Sites reached, of six |
|---|---|---|---|
| Snake | 16.5 | 13.6 | 4 |
| Gopher | 19.9 | 12.3 | 3 |
| Raccoon | 25.1 | 38.3 | 4 |
| Bird | 15.4 | 29.6 | 5 |
The other six beat it on snake by about three places, and on gopher by about eight. Gopher is a small row: 1,595 times shown across three of the six sites.
Snake has a reason. One of the six, the site in our longest-running client report, has published snake content for years, and it pulls the whole group average to 13.6 on its own. Its snake post kept a first-page position and still lost most of its clicks. A page for every animal doesn't win every animal on its own. In this set, the one pest site that focused on one animal is the one that beat it on that animal.
Which Terms Are Crowded and Which Are Open
The last column of each table counts how many of the six pest sites get shown for that animal on the searches we counted.
Most of the table reaches every site. Rat, mouse, general rodent, mole, general wildlife and squirrel reach all six, and bat reaches five. Every one of those sites is already competing for those terms, whether it meant to or not. On rat, mouse and general rodent, the pest companies sit at position 26 to 35 in the crowd.
A few animals reach fewer. Raccoon, in the second table, reaches four of the six, and gopher three. Skunk reaches three, on only 177 times shown between them. Opossum reaches two, and one site holds 92% of its 9,432 times shown. Neither average says much about the group, so neither has a row in the tables. Those are the animals where a real page has the least company.
The Honest Version of the Rodent Question
Rodent work is the largest animal category in this whole dataset. Across the six pest sites it's 113,433 of the 207,670 hireable animal searches we counted, more than half.
It's also a category where those sites already show up six times out of six.
So it's not an unclaimed market. It's a crowded one where nobody in this set ranks well. The six average position 26 to 35 on rodent terms. The page-per-animal site averages 6 to 20 on the same terms, and on rat most of that comes from its articles. The gap isn't demand. One site can't prove why.
Three Things to Do With This
Give each animal its own service page. Name the animal in the page's title, heading and address. On rat, the site that ranks higher gets most of its lead from question articles, and those are the searches where Google's own answer takes the most clicks, as our longest-running client report shows. Its other rat pages still beat the six, and those are the pages built to take the call.
Don't count on rodent to set you apart. Six of six pest sites are already there. Look at the animals that reach half the sites or fewer, like skunk and opossum, and at the animal your competitors have two sentences about on a general page.
Check position before you write anything. Search Console will tell you in five minutes which animals already send you impressions. Those are the pages to build first, because the demand already shows in your own data before you spend a dollar.
What This Does Not Prove
Seven sites is a small set, and only one of them has a page for every animal. One site isn't a category.
Times shown isn't people. It counts how often a page appeared, and some of it is automated. It isn't a count of customers, and we don't report it as one. Here it only tells you where a site sits.
We start the window at Sept. 13, 2025 on purpose. Before Sept. 12, 2025, rank-tracking tools most likely added impressions at deep positions to many sites' Search Console data. Google turned off the setting they relied on that week, and earlier data would make every page here look buried deeper than it is.
The page-per-animal site's mole position rests on 146 times shown. Treat that row as thin.
Average position hides a lot. A site can average 30 because it sits at 30 every day, or because it ranks 3 on one term and 60 on another. We used the impression-weighted average, which is the fairer version, and it's still an average.
None of these numbers is a revenue figure. We know where the sites rank and how many people clicked. What happened after the click isn't in this data.
Search Console hides its rarest searches, so the real volume behind every row is higher than shown. We won't put a number on how much is missing, because the share changes from site to site. Every count here is a floor.
If you want to see where your own animal pages sit before you change anything, book a call or send a note and we'll pull the same report for your site.
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These Are Your Clients. Why Do Six of Them Rank This Low?
Because every one of them is a pest control company first, with a wildlife division beside it. Their sites were built to sell pest work, and the animal pages went in around that, not at the center. They're our clients, so the ranking is ours to answer for. That's the gap these pages measure, and closing it on these sites is on our list now.
Why Does This Page Use One Whole Year?
Because what drives a wildlife call shifts through the year, and a few months would measure the season, not the sites. Every table puts the sites side by side inside the same stretch, Sept. 13, 2025 through Sept. 16, 2026, just over twelve months, so every season is in it. Only sites with that whole year are in the set. It starts in September because rank-tracking tools inflated Google's impression counts before that.
Are All Seven Sites Cube Clients?
Yes. All seven are Cube clients. We audit our own book in public.