The Activity Log is the live on-screen stream RankGear prints while an analysis runs — each phase it moves through, the result for every page it fetches, the retries it attempts, the provider-collection details, and the engine diagnostics, in the order they happen.
| Term | Activity Log |
|---|---|
| Category | APIs, Reliability and Publishing |
| Also known as | Live Log |
| Where it appears | Analysis Run |
What it means in RankGear
The Activity Log is the panel that fills in real time once you start an Analysis Run. Rather than leaving you staring at a spinner, RankGear narrates the work: it reports when it enters each phase — pulling the SERP, scraping competitor pages, collecting metrics from third-party providers, then scoring — and it prints a line for every page as that page succeeds, fails, or gets retried. Credential checks and low-level engine diagnostics land in the same stream, so the log doubles as the first place to look when a run behaves unexpectedly.
How to interpret it
Read the log to separate a transient problem from a broken configuration. A timeout, a rate-limit notice, or a single failed fetch that is followed by a retry line is usually transient — the run works around it and continues. A credential test that comes back as an authorization failure, or a provider that rejects the request outright, points to configuration you need to fix: a wrong or expired API key, a mistyped publishing target, or a disabled account. The visible status, the retry decision, and the result of any credential test together tell you which of the two you are looking at before you spend time re-running.
| What you see in the log | What it tells you |
|---|---|
| Timeout, then a retry line | Transient — the run recovers on its own; no action needed |
| Rate-limit notice, run continues | Transient throttling from a provider; the run paces itself and proceeds |
| Authorization failure on a credential test | Configuration — fix the key or account before re-running |
| A phase that stops with a diagnostic | Engine-level issue; the diagnostic text is the starting point for the fix |
Example
You launch a run and watch the log. A competitor page stalls and hits the fetch timeout; the next line records one bounded, longer retry and the second attempt returns the page, so scoring continues uninterrupted. Minutes later a metrics provider answers with an authorization error — the log names the provider and the failure and stops that collection rather than firing repeated paid calls against a bad key. From those two lines alone you know the first page was fine and the second issue is a credential you need to correct.
Important considerations
- The log is a diagnostic view of how the run executed, not a ranking signal — nothing in it is a Google score, and a clean log does not mean a page will rank.
- Any provider metrics referenced in the log are comparative indicators from that provider on its own scale, not measurements of Google’s ranking system.
- Credentials and remote publishing targets deserve care: credential tests should be read-only wherever possible so a check never changes live data.
- Secrets stay redacted in the stream — keys and tokens appear masked, so you can share or screenshot a log for support without leaking them.
Related terms
Part of the RankGear glossary · how RankGear measures · the 870 factors.