A billable lookup is a provider request that spends credits or incurs a charge against your own external service account — the cost lands on your provider bill, not on RankGear.
| Term | Billable Lookup |
|---|---|
| Category | Entities, Links and Authority |
| Also known as | Paid API Call |
| Where it appears | Cost notices and API guidance |
What it means in RankGear
Some of the authority and off-page evidence RankGear can add to a run — backlinks, referring domains, named entities, and provider authority metrics — comes from third-party services you connect with your own API key. Every request RankGear sends to one of those connected providers draws down the credits or billing on that account, and RankGear labels such a request a billable lookup. The distinction surfaces in the cost notices shown before an enrichment step and in the API guidance for each provider, so you can see which parts of a run are free to collect and which ones spend against a service you pay for directly.
How to interpret it
Read a billable lookup as a spend decision, not a quality signal. Enabling a paid provider enriches a run with data you would not otherwise have, but the value it returns lives on that provider’s own index and scale — keep the provider’s availability separate from the numbers it reports, and only compare authority or entity evidence among pages measured under the same run conditions and the same provider. When you weigh whether to turn a provider on, the question is whether the added entity or link evidence is worth the per-call cost for the set of URLs in that run, since each measured page typically triggers its own lookup.
Example
You run an off-page audit for a ten-URL comparison set and enable a connected backlink provider to pull referring domains and authority scores. RankGear shows a cost notice explaining that the enrichment will issue one billable lookup per URL against your provider account. You approve it, the run adds referring-domain counts and authority metrics to the comparison sheet, and your provider dashboard later reflects the ten calls those lookups consumed.
Important considerations
- The cost of a billable lookup is charged to your external provider account under your own API key; RankGear does not resell provider credits or absorb the charge.
- Paid providers use different indexes and scales, so the authority and entity numbers they return are comparative indicators within that provider’s own system, not Google scores, and they say nothing on their own about whether a page will rank.
- Only compare provider evidence among pages measured under the same provider and the same run conditions; values from different providers are not interchangeable.
- Because each measured URL generally triggers its own lookup, the total cost of an enrichment scales with the size of the comparison set — review the cost notice before approving a large run.
Related terms
Part of the RankGear glossary · how RankGear measures · the 870 factors.