RankGear uses a small, consistent vocabulary. These are the terms you’ll meet most, defined plainly — each one is a comparison against the field, never a ranking guarantee.
- The field
- The set of pages actually ranking for your exact query, at your chosen depth, country, language, device, and location. RankGear measures the field first, then places your page inside it. Your tracked page is excluded from its own benchmark.
- Optimization score
- How much of the supported deficit your page has closed against the field and your chosen deficit strategy. Shown in degrees on Analysis Run and out of 100 on On-Page Audit. A coverage measure, not a Google quality score or a probability of ranking.
- Deficit strategy
- The statistical target a gap is measured against: the field average, the maximum after an outlier guard, or the competitor mean plus 1, 1.5, or 2 standard deviations. It changes the target, never the measured values.
- Correlation (r)
- The strength of the relationship between a factor and position within the measured field. Evidence for where to investigate first — not proof the factor moves rankings.
- Factor ID
- A stable identifier for each measured factor, kept constant across runs so Diff and Trends compare the same measurement over time.
- BM25 / BM25F
- A relevance-scoring method RankGear uses to place a draft or page within the field’s comparison corpus. “Would rank” means relevance placement, not a live-position forecast.
- Topical Heatmap
- A formula-transparent comparison of exact term coverage across the field — banded Missing, Light, Covered, or Strong. A coverage comparison, not a density target.
- Zone Architecture
- An advisory Z1–Z9 review of whether a rendered page covers the semantic responsibilities its type is expected to. It sits beside the ranking math and never changes the score.
See these in context on the methodology page or the factor reference.