Force HTML is a manual fallback in RankGear: when the app cannot retrieve a URL through its normal renderer, you paste in the page’s rendered markup yourself so the analysis can still run.
| Term | Force HTML |
|---|---|
| Category | Page Structure and Technical SEO |
| Also known as | Forced HTML |
| Where it appears | Analysis Run results area |
What it means in RankGear
Most of the time RankGear fetches and renders a page on its own before scoring it. Some URLs resist that: a bot wall, an aggressive firewall, a login gate, or a heavily scripted page can leave the renderer with nothing usable. Force HTML is the escape hatch for those cases. Rather than dropping the URL from the run, you supply the rendered HTML by hand — typically copied from your browser’s view of the page — and RankGear treats that markup as the fetched source, extracting elements and comparing them against the ranking pages exactly as it would for any page it retrieved itself.
How to interpret it
The quality of a forced run depends entirely on what you paste. Give RankGear the fully rendered DOM — the markup after JavaScript has run, not the raw view-source response — or client-side content will be missing and the analysis will understate the page. Paste from the same page state a searcher would see: the live, logged-out, final rendered version. If you supply a stale copy, a mobile variant, or a page behind a personalization layer, the extracted elements and counts will describe that snapshot rather than the URL Google indexes. Treat Force HTML as accurate to the input, not to the live page.
Example
You are analyzing a competitor whose site returns a 403 to RankGear’s fetcher but loads normally in your browser. The run leaves that URL blank. You open the page in Chrome, copy the rendered HTML from the DevTools Elements panel, and paste it into Force HTML for that URL. RankGear now parses the same title, headings, body copy, and schema it would have parsed on a clean fetch, and the page rejoins the comparison against the other ranking results instead of sitting out the run.
Important considerations
- Force HTML fixes a retrieval problem, not a measurement problem. The extracted values are only as current and complete as the markup you paste in.
- Use the rendered DOM after scripts execute, not the raw HTTP response, or JavaScript-injected content will be absent.
- Anything computed from the forced markup — element counts, content overlap with competitors — is a comparative indicator of how the page is built, not a Google ranking score. A page that now matches the leaders structurally has not thereby been made to rank.
- Because the input is manual, it is easy to introduce error: a truncated paste, the wrong tab, or an outdated cache all produce a technically valid run that no longer reflects the real page.
Related terms
Part of the RankGear glossary · how RankGear measures · the 870 factors.