How to Read Your Listing Grade Score

Rankazo grades a listing A through F using six components: title, tags, photos & video, description, price, and freshness. It's a fully deterministic rubric — no AI judgment call decides the score itself — which means the same listing scores the same way every time, and the reasons behind the grade are always traceable back to something real and checkable on the listing.

Title (up to 25 points)

Checks whether one of the listing's own tags appears in the title's first 40 characters, whether the title length falls in the 70–140 character range, whether at least two of the listing's tags show up anywhere in the title, and whether any single word is repeated three or more times (a stuffing signal). Each of those is worth real points on its own — a title can lose points on stuffing while still doing well on length and keyword placement.

Tags (up to 25 points)

Rewards using more of the 13 available slots, having no duplicate or near-duplicate (plural/singular) tags, having a majority of tags be genuine multi-word phrases rather than single words, and — when there's enough real comparable data in Rankazo's own corpus — whether the listing's tags score at or above the median real demand for tags like them. That last check only counts when there's genuinely enough data to judge it honestly; otherwise it's dropped from the score rather than guessed at.

Photos & video (up to 20 points)

Checks real photo count (5+ and 8+ are separate thresholds), whether a video is present, and what share of photos have real alt text set. This is the one component that requires two live calls to Etsy per listing to check — which is also why a full shop grading pass takes real time, not an instant response.

Description (up to 15 points)

Checks whether the opening paragraph is substantial (the part most buyers and search actually read), whether overall length falls in a healthy 300–2,000 character range, and whether real title/tag keywords actually appear in the body — not just crammed into the title and tags while the description talks about something else entirely.

Price (up to 5 points, or excluded entirely)

Compares the listing's price against the real median price of comparable listings in Rankazo's own corpus that share its tags. If there aren't at least a handful of genuine real comparables yet, this component is excluded from the score entirely — both the points and the denominator — rather than comparing against a guess.

Freshness (up to 5 points)

A simple, real check on when the listing was last modified or renewed: full points inside 90 days, partial credit out to 180, none beyond that. It's a small slice of the total score, but it's the one component that changes purely by revisiting a listing — no rewrite required.

Why the letter grade sometimes surprises you

Because a component with too little real data gets excluded rather than scored as zero, two listings with the same raw point total can land on different letter grades if one of them had a component dropped — the percentage is always points earned over points actually available, never over a fixed 100. That's deliberate: it's the same principle behind never substituting a guess for a real measurement anywhere else in Rankazo.