Why otto.de rankings depend on location – and how to check them correctly from abroad

What we observe

While building MarktRank we repeated the same searches from different locations. The result was unambiguous: requests from abroad return a different order than requests from Germany. In some cases products that sat on page 1 from Germany were missing from the foreign result list entirely. Individual product pages answered with a “page not found” message outside Germany although the product was selling normally inside Germany.

OTTO does not explain publicly why otto.de behaves this way. Delivery availability and shipping regions are the obvious candidates: a seller who does not ship to Germany, or only serves certain countries, is treated differently for visitors from other countries. For you as a seller only one thing matters: what your shopper in Germany sees is the ranking that makes sales.

Who this affects

• Sellers from the Netherlands, Poland, Austria, France or Spain who sell on otto.de and check their position from their own office.
• Agencies based outside Germany that report OTTO rankings to clients.
• German sellers on the road, or on a company VPN whose exit node is abroad.
• Teams using cloud tools that fetch pages automatically from a data centre in Ireland, the US or Eastern Europe.

In all four cases the observed position can be better or worse than the one your shoppers actually see. Decisions built on it – changing the product title because “the ranking collapsed”, say – then miss the mark.

A VPN is not the answer

A consumer VPN with a German exit gives you a German IP address, but usually that of a data centre. We have seen otto.de treat such visits differently from connections out of a private household: sometimes with differing results, sometimes with blocks after a few searches. On top of that, every change of VPN server gives you a different starting point, and measurements stop being comparable.

If you want to check manually, ask someone in Germany to run the search in a private browser window without logging in – the same way every time. For more than a handful of terms that is not practical.

How a rank tracker measures

MarktRank opens otto.de exclusively through a German connection, without a login, without history and without previous searches that could influence the result. Every check reads the complete result pages (120 products per page as of November 2026) and records the position and page your product sits on and whether it is an organic result or an ad. The measurement is therefore identical for every term and every day – regardless of where you happen to be sitting.

What a tracker cannot reproduce is the personal view of one individual shopper with a customer account and purchase history. How big that difference is, and why it rarely matters for decisions, is explained in the article What a rank tracker does not see.

Checklist for sellers abroad

1. Do not derive decisions from the foreign result list. If your product sits at position 40 from Amsterdam, you know nothing yet about position 40 in Hamburg.
2. Pick one measurement source. Either a rank tracker measuring from Germany or one fixed person on site with a fixed procedure – not a mix of both.
3. Have product pages checked from Germany when they show “not found” for you. The product is often live in Germany.
4. Stamp screenshots with date and location when you collect evidence for clients or colleagues.
5. Check your shipping countries in the seller portal. If you ship to Germany but only ever measure from abroad, you may not even see your own offer.

Bottom line

The ranking that counts is the ranking from Germany. Everything else is a snapshot from a perspective your shoppers do not have. With MarktRank's free rank check you can look this up for one product and one search term right away – measured from Germany, no account needed.

Frequently asked questions