Despite the diverse criticism, academic rankings show some potentialities, such as serving as a source of information for the decision making of users, companies, and governments, allowing transparency of information and accountability actions. In this article, we identify and examine, from a longitudinal perspective, the evolution that Chilean State Universities have had on the different academic rankings in the country. We analyze literature and documents from secondary sources of information. The study allowed to verify the existence of three groups of universities, classified from highest to lowest performance, evidencing, among other facts, that the lower performing universities are predominantly characterized by being far from the center of the country and for not presenting a tradition in scientific research, differently from the elite universities, which are more complex.