Nightwatch — SEO Rank Tracking Platform

SEO teams and agencies need to know exactly where their websites rank — across search engines, devices, locations and competitors — and how that changes over time. At enterprise scale that means tracking hundreds of thousands of keywords and storing tens of millions of daily ranking snapshots, then serving fast, filterable analytics on top of it all. On top of the data challenge, the platform has to handle multi-tenant accounts, plan-based billing, white-label resellers and a polished dashboard. Nightwatch needed a platform that delivers all of this with the speed and reliability that demanding SEO professionals expect.

We built and evolved Nightwatch's core rank-tracking platform: a polished Ember.js dashboard backed by a Ruby on Rails application API and a high-performance Go analytics API over ClickHouse. The Rails API handles accounts, projects, keywords, competitors, billing and white-label configuration, while the Go data API serves all the time-series ranking analytics — position history, SERP feature breakdowns, competitor comparisons and automated insights — fast enough to feel instant even over very large datasets. A service gateway provides unified authentication, plan-based access and usage metering across the platform's services, and a suite of AI-powered SEO tools (keyword research, idea generation and content analysis) is exposed through the same gateway. The whole system runs on Kubernetes, deployed across multiple clouds via GitOps.

Nightwatch's customers get an enterprise rank tracker that stays fast at massive scale, with rich analytics, competitor benchmarking, automated insights and white-label reporting. The move to a Go-plus-ClickHouse analytics layer keeps queries responsive across very large keyword and ranking datasets, while the gateway and billing layer support a multi-tenant, plan-based SaaS business. The platform spans many coordinated services deployed across multiple clouds, giving Nightwatch the reliability and headroom to grow.

• Multi-Engine Rank Tracking: Daily keyword positions across search engines, devices and locations.
• Competitor Benchmarking: Side-by-side ranking comparisons against tracked competitors.
• Fast Analytics at Scale: A ClickHouse-backed Go API keeps queries responsive over huge datasets.
• Automated Insights: Surfaces ranking drops, page-one losses and new opportunities automatically.
• AI SEO Tools: Keyword research, idea generation and content analysis built in.
• White-Label & Reporting: Custom-branded dashboards and reports for agencies and resellers.

• Ember.js: The customer-facing rank-tracking dashboard.
• Ruby on Rails: Core application API — accounts, projects, keywords, billing and white-label.
• Go & ClickHouse: High-performance analytics API and columnar data warehouse for ranking time-series.
• Service Gateway (Go): Unified authentication, plan-based access and usage metering.
• AI tools (OpenAI + Google Ads API): Keyword research, generation and content analysis.
• Kubernetes & ArgoCD: Multi-cloud, GitOps-based deployment across many services.

We worked across the full platform, from the Ember.js dashboard down to the data layer. A key thread of the work was scaling analytics: introducing a dedicated Go API over ClickHouse to serve ranking time-series far faster than a traditional relational query layer could, while the Rails API continued to own accounts, billing and configuration. We built a service gateway to unify authentication, plan limits and usage metering across the growing set of services, and exposed a suite of AI-powered SEO tools through it. The entire platform is deployed on Kubernetes across multiple clouds using ArgoCD and GitOps, giving Nightwatch a reliable, repeatable path from commit to production across all its services.