An entity provider is an external service you connect to RankGear that identifies the entities on a page and supplies related off-page enrichment — things like backlinks, referring domains, and authority signals — for use during a run.
| Term | Entity Provider |
|---|---|
| Category | Entities, Links and Authority |
| Also known as | Entity API |
| Where it appears | Settings → API keys |
What it means in RankGear
You add an entity provider under Settings → API keys by pasting the service’s API key. Once a key is present, RankGear calls that provider while it analyzes a run and pulls in data it does not gather on its own: the entities recognized in a page’s content, plus off-page figures such as backlink counts, referring domains, and third-party authority scores. Those values land in the comparison sheets next to RankGear’s own on-page measurements. Dedicated entity-extraction services (for example, TextRazor) and link and authority data vendors are the kinds of providers this key slot is for.
How to interpret it
Keep two things apart. Provider availability — whether a key is set and the service actually returned data — is not the value it reports; a missing or rate-limited provider simply leaves those columns empty rather than marking a page as weak. And compare entity or authority evidence only across pages measured in the same run and by the same provider, because every vendor builds its own index on its own scale.
| Enrichment | What an enabled provider adds |
|---|---|
| Entities | The people, products, organizations, and concepts the service recognizes in the page text. |
| Backlinks & referring domains | Off-page link counts pulled from the provider’s index. |
| Authority metrics | The vendor’s own comparative authority score for each URL. |
Example
Say you are comparing your draft against nine ranking pages for “commercial roof coating.” With no entity provider connected, the workbook shows RankGear’s on-page measurements alone. After you paste a TextRazor key under Settings → API keys and re-run, the same sheet gains entity and off-page columns — and you can see that the top three results each reference the manufacturer and product-standard entities your draft leaves out.
Important considerations
- Provider metrics use different indexes and scales. They are comparative indicators, not Google scores, and a higher number does not mean a page will rank.
- Compare provider values only among pages pulled in the same run and from the same provider — figures from different vendors are not interchangeable.
- Enrichment depends on the key: an unset, expired, or rate-limited provider leaves those columns blank rather than penalizing the page.
Related terms
Part of the RankGear glossary · how RankGear measures · the 870 factors.