A provider metric is a value defined and calculated by an external data provider rather than by RankGear itself. It reaches your report only when that provider is enabled for the run, and it carries the provider’s own scale and index.
| Term | Provider Metric |
|---|---|
| Category | Entities, Links and Authority |
| Also known as | Third-Party Metric |
| Where it appears | Off-page reports |
What it means in RankGear
Provider metrics appear in RankGear’s off-page reports. When you turn on a data provider for a run, RankGear pulls that provider’s own numbers — domain or page authority scores, backlink counts, referring domains, and entity signals — and displays them next to the on-page analysis it computes itself. The figure you see belongs to the provider’s index; RankGear reports it as-is rather than recalculating it, which is why the same URL can carry a different provider metric from one data source to the next.
How to interpret it
Read a provider metric as a comparative indicator within a single provider’s world, not as an absolute grade. Separate two questions: whether the provider was available for the run, and what value it returned. Only compare authority or entity evidence across pages that were measured under the same provider and the same run conditions — an authority score from one vendor’s 0–100 scale means nothing set beside another vendor’s, because each is built on its own crawl, index size, and normalization.
| Provider metric | What it tells you |
|---|---|
| Authority score | The provider’s relative estimate of a domain or page’s link strength, on that provider’s scale |
| Backlinks | Count of inbound links the provider has indexed for the URL |
| Referring domains | Number of distinct domains linking in, per the provider’s index |
| Entity signals | Named entities and associations the provider attributes to the page or site |
Example
You run an off-page report on ten competing URLs with a backlink provider enabled. The report shows each URL’s referring domains and an authority score: the top result sits at 58, a mid-page result at 41, both on that provider’s 0–100 scale. That 58-versus-41 gap is a useful within-report comparison. Swap in a different provider on the next run and the same top result might read 72 — not because anything changed, but because you are now reading a different index.
Important considerations
- Different providers use different indexes and scales, so their metrics are not interchangeable and should never be mixed in a single comparison.
- Provider metrics are comparative indicators from a third party, not Google scores — a higher value does not mean Google rates the page higher, and it does not make a page rank.
- Treat any relationship between a provider metric and ranking as correlation, not causation.
- The metric only populates when the provider is enabled for the run; provider availability and billing can leave the field empty even when the URL exists.
Related terms
Part of the RankGear glossary · how RankGear measures · the 870 factors.