Reference
What Do Our Measurement Terms Mean?
This glossary defines the vocabulary of the instrument — the four measured pillars, the coverage grades, and the core terms — in words you can act on. Every definition is the same one the reports and the methodology use.
The Pillars
The Four Measured Pillars
The four dimensions Rank DNA reads, blended into one headline composite.
- DNA Match
- How much of the winning on-page signature your page already carries — measured against the pages ranking above you, not a prediction of your rank.
- Organic Presence
- How often your domain shows up in the organic results for the buyer phrases — coverage, weighted toward the top ten and the top three.
- Competitive Position
- When you do appear, how strong you are versus the other domains — your best organic position, your place on the leaderboard, and your keyword footprint.
- Closeable Gap
- How much of the distance to the winners is realistically within reach — credit for the separating signals you already meet, weighted by how reachable the rest are.
The Vocabulary
The Core Vocabulary
The measurement words that recur across every report and every methodology page.
- Cohort
- The set of pages we read for your market — the top organic cohort that ranks above you and the trailing cohort below, measured on the same signals so a difference is a real difference.
- Signal Differential
- What separates the winning pages from the losing ones — the signals where the top cohort genuinely pulls away from the bottom, derived fresh from your real competitors.
- Signal
- One of the 58 on-page things we measure, from the secure connection to structured data — the ruler DNA Match is read against, defined in the signals catalog.
- Coverage Grade
- The honesty label on every number — Confirmed, Observed, Estimated, or Not measured — so a reader can always tell a direct read from an inference.
- Composite
- A single weighted headline read of the four pillars, so a pretty page can never look elite while it is invisible. There is one headline, never two.
- Machine Visibility
- Whether the crawlers that feed AI answer engines and assistants can read your site at all — a site they cannot read is a site they cannot cite.
The Rank Codex Report holds this vocabulary steady at depth — the same terms, the same measurement, tracked over time.