How the position is found

You give tagcheck one of your listings and a phrase a buyer might type. Once a day it runs that search against Etsy's public search endpoint, pages through the results until it finds your listing, and records the position. If the position moved by enough to matter, it writes to you.

It searches the way a shopper does

There is no privileged access here. tagcheck asks Etsy's public listing search the same question a shopper's browser asks, with an application key and nothing else. It has no connection to your shop, sees no orders, no drafts, no statistics — and it does not need any of that, because where you rank is public information you simply cannot see from inside your own dashboard.

What counts as a move worth telling you about

A fixed number of places would be the wrong test. Ten places at #14 is the difference between being seen and not being seen; ten places at #180 is the difference between two kinds of invisible. So there are four lines, and two different bars.

• The lines. First screen (top 12), first page (top 48), found but well down, and not in the first 250. Crossing one is mailed as long as the move is more than three places — because #12 to #13 is a boundary we drew, not an event in your shop.
• Staying where you are. Moving inside the same band takes half the distance to your position: four places at #8, twenty at #40, ninety at #180. Below that it is the search index breathing, and there is nothing to do about it in either direction.
• Appearing or vanishing is mailed at any size. Falling out of the first 250 entirely is the one nobody wants and always the first thing in the message.

Your board shows every movement, however small. The mail is the filtered version. Etsy re-ranks constantly, and a tool that writes to you about three places of drift every morning is a tool you stop reading by the end of the week.

Why it stops at 250

Because past that the number is not actionable. There is no meaningful difference between position 340 and position 900 — in both cases nobody typing that phrase will ever see you, and the answer is the same: change the phrase, or change the listing.

What is kept, and what is thrown away

Two positions per tracked phrase: where you are now, and where you were on the last pass. That pair is what makes "down eleven" sayable. There is no rank history — no chart, no series, nothing accumulating. Only one number survives long-term, your best position ever seen, and that is a single integer rather than a record of your shop.

That is partly Etsy's API terms, which limit how long listing data may be retained, and partly a straight answer to what the tool is for: you need to know what changed since yesterday and how good today is. A six-month chart is a different product with different obligations.