Is Google intentionally trying to kill rank checking (SERP lookup) by closing their Web API?

I'm not sure I agree with entirely, but there is certainly a huge shift away from using rankings as a primary KPI in reporting to clients nowadays. Having said that, it's still a very important aspect of gauging a websites organic search health at any given moment. Sure, not everyone will see the positions you do - but personalisation doesn't affect as many queries as you might immediately assume At the end of the day as long as being #1 on an unpersonalised search query yields more visitors than being at #2 or #3, site owners will stay concerned about rankings which mean SEOs will still need to report on them too. Rank checking is not going away any time soon and there are a few 3rd party companies out there that do all the SERP scraping for you and give  you a nice API to play with to boot.

I believe rank checking is grossly overrated and largely a waste of time.  Particularly given the increasingly personalized (and localized) nature of search results, trying to determine the global ranking of individual keywords and keyword phrases is, IMHO, rather quixotic.  Much better:  A|B testing calls to action and overall web pages, regular usability testing of one's site, and generally intensive analytical analysis.  Conversion measurements and analyses beat a fixation on search / traffic ranks 100% of the time. My thoughts on this are based on my SEO work prior to Google, my learnings from my time as Google's Search Evangelist, and conversations with a wide swath of online entrepreneurs and other folks doing business online.  Note that I do not speak for Google officially in this area anymore.

Look at referring search traffic, instead. Watch which non-branded phrases (phrases that don't include your company/product names) drive traffic, and how much. In the end, that's what you want out of SEO anyway. If you focus on that, you can reduce your dependence on rankings.

, can you share those techniques? With Google Instant, Google is serving pages in an increasingly more complex manner, meaning that if you want to reverse engineer this, it will become increasingly fragile.   try to tell this to any website owner. If you own an eCommerce store selling golf clubs, and you rank #1 for a keyword versus #5, that's a difference of $1000s.

Reverse engineering Google with the rapid changes to the algorithm is like finding a single needle in a haystack the size of Canada!  Google like any other company needs to keep users happy by continually serving the most relevant content with the least user friction. The best way to do that is to promote content that is timely, relevant and engaging, oh and produced by authors and publishers that are trusted. These are tried and true 'tactics' that are really just old fashioned marketing principles wrapped in a pretty new bow.

Google has moved toward supporting rank-checking directly.  Google opposes 3rd-party rank-checking because of the load it creates on their servers. Nonetheless, Google is reporting more ranks in its search referral data (nothing comes from HTTPS search, of course) so I don't think people need to worry about their rankings data for a long time to come. Still, it's highly overrated.

There are still ways to parse result pages in order to determine rankings. This was the method used before the API existed.