Methodology & sources

Companies ranked by size

Three metrics, each independently sourced and shown so the ranking is auditable:

• Revenue — most recent fiscal-year revenue. Public companies: SEC EDGAR 10-K (annual report). Private companies: company-published figures, IBISWorld, or franchise systemwide sales from the most recent FDD where applicable. Marked “est.” when not directly disclosed.
• Locations / outlets — most recent corporate count or FDD Item 20 outlet count.
• Employees — most recent 10-K or company press release; marked “n/a” for private companies that don’t disclose.

Two-year size change

Revenue at FY-2 vs FY 0 (most recently reported). Public companies use 10-K comparatives. Private chains/franchisors use FDD year-over-year comparisons or self-reported figures. Companies without two reliable data points are excluded from this chart.

Local vs national keyword strength

Both numbers come from DataForSEO Labs dataforseo_labs/google/ranked_keywords/live with location_code = 2840 (United States):

• National: total count of US Google keywords the domain ranks for.
• Local: same query, filtered to keywords containing local-intent modifiers — near me / near you / nearby or any of the top-30 US metro / city names. The ratio (local ÷ national) reveals whether a brand is investing in city-level landing pages and “[service] near me” intent capture.
• Bubble size encodes the estimated traffic value (etv) of the top-100 keywords.

For chains operating on a single national domain, this is a more useful signal than per-metro location_code queries, which return very sparse data because Google rankings rarely differ enough between metros to materialise as distinct DataForSEO datasets.

Backlink profile

From DataForSEO Backlinks API, backlinks/summary/live (totals) and backlinks/referring_domains/live (top-1000 referring domains, sorted by domain rank). Referring domains are bucketed by DataForSEO’s 0–1000 rank field:

• Low (0–49): scraper, directory, low-authority sites.
• Mid (50–199): industry blogs, smaller publishers, decent-quality content sites.
• High (200+): mainstream news, .gov / .edu, large publishers.

The bucket thresholds are set to match the actual distribution of referring-domain rank in the wild, which is heavily concentrated below 300 even for strong sites.

12-month referring-domain growth

From DataForSEO backlinks/history/live, monthly snapshots. The chart shows net change in referring domains over the trailing 12 months. Companies with fewer than three months of history are excluded.

Caveats

• Private companies are partially observable. Where revenue or employee counts are not disclosed, charts will show “n/a” rather than estimates.
• Franchise systemwide sales and corporate revenue are not the same thing; we label which is shown.
• SEO data reflects a single point in time. Monthly refresh is possible — see footer for the most recent pull date on each niche page.