A Comparison Set is the ordered group of currently-ranking pages that RankGear measures for a single analysis, together with any separate target page you ask it to score against them.
| Term | Comparison Set |
|---|---|
| Category | Product and Workflow |
| Also known as | Competitor Set, Measured Field |
| Where it appears | Analysis results and workbook |
What it means in RankGear
Every analysis in RankGear is built on a Comparison Set: the specific pages the tool pulled for your keyword and location, held in a fixed order, plus the optional target page you are trying to improve. This is the field RankGear actually measures. When the workbook reports that a factor sits at a certain value “across the top results,” it is describing the pages in this set and nothing outside it. The set is captured at analysis time and saved with the report, so every score, average, and recommendation you see is anchored to that same collection of pages rather than to a shifting live SERP.
How to interpret it
Read the Comparison Set as the sample your numbers are drawn from, and check it before you trust the conclusions. Confirm that the pages in the set are genuine competitors for the query and intent you care about, that the location and device match what you were targeting, and that your target page is the one you meant to measure. If the set is padded with off-topic results, aggregator pages, or a mismatched intent, the factor averages will describe those pages, not the opportunity you are chasing. The set is a snapshot: reruns on a later date can return a different collection of pages, which is why two analyses of the same keyword can differ.
Example
You run an analysis for “commercial roof coating” targeting a services page you own. RankGear assembles a Comparison Set of the ten ranking URLs it found plus your target page, then reports that the ranking pages average roughly 1,400 words while yours has 620. Because that average is computed only over the pages in this set, you know the gap is measured against the current competitors for that exact query, not against a generic benchmark.
Important considerations
- The Comparison Set is what every factor value, average, and recommendation in the report is calculated from, so a weak or off-intent set produces weak guidance no matter how the scores look.
- It is a point-in-time capture. Rerunning the same keyword later can return different pages, so treat each set as tied to the report it was saved with.
- Values drawn from the set are comparative indicators of what currently-ranking pages have in common. They are not Google’s ranking scores, and matching them does not by itself cause a page to rank.
- Provider-reported metrics on the pages in the set carry the scale and coverage limits of whichever provider supplied them, so compare within a set rather than across sets built from different sources.
Related terms
Part of the RankGear glossary · how RankGear measures · the 870 factors.