Key concepts and vocabulary

Summary#

Eight words carry most of the meaning in Metric Vault, and every other article in this library assumes them. Read this once and the rest of the documentation stops needing footnotes. Nothing here is difficult; the point is that each word has one precise meaning in this product, and guessing at it leads people to the wrong conclusion about what they are being charged for.

Purpose#

Software vocabulary is usually learned by accident, which is how someone ends up believing that reopening a saved report costs money, or that inviting a teammate shares their credit allowance. Both beliefs are wrong here, and both are expensive in wasted time.

This page defines each term once, in the order you meet it, and links to the article that owns the full explanation. That is the pattern used throughout this knowledge base: one fact lives in one place, and everything else links to it.

Overview#

The eight terms, in the order they matter.

How it works#

Workspace#

A workspace is everything one account owns: its monitored URLs, rank alerts, scheduled reports, saved results, competitor lists, keyword lists, white-label branding, and blog sites. It is identified by the owner's email address. You always own exactly one, created the moment you sign up, and you never need to configure it.

On plans that include seats you can invite people into your workspace, and they see your monitored URLs, alerts, scheduled reports and shared analyses. You can also be invited into someone else's, in which case you can switch between contexts from the Team screen. Workspaces explained covers the whole model, including who pays for what.

Tool#

A tool is one measurement or one piece of generated work. "Domain Overview" is a tool. "Schema Tool" is a tool. There are roughly seventy of them, grouped into the thirteen sections listed in the left rail. Every tool page has the same anatomy: a title and description, an input box, a run button whose label states the cost, a results area, and a long explainer below the fold that teaches the underlying idea.

Some entries in the sidebar are not single tools but workflows, which fire several tools at once against the same input and return one consolidated report. The six workflows live in the Get Started section and their buttons state the combined cost, for example Run Full Analysis · 20 reports.

Run#

A run is one execution of a tool against one input. You type a domain, URL, or keyword into the field marked with a placeholder such as e.g. nike.com, then press the run button or the Enter key. While it works you see:

Analyzing… this can take a few seconds for live data.

Most runs finish in ten to twenty-five seconds. Workflows take longer because they are several runs at once. How to run a tool covers the mechanics, including the sample buttons that let you see a real result before spending anything.

Credit#

A credit is the unit that meters a run. Every tool has a fixed price, shown on its run button, and the price reflects what the run genuinely costs us in live search data and AI calls. The prices are:

Your plan grants a monthly allowance. The counter resets on the first of each calendar month at 00:00 UTC, and unused credits do not carry over. Your current position is always visible in the top bar, as <used> / <quota> reports.

Two rules surprise people, and both are deliberate. First, tools priced below 3 credits are never blocked by the monthly allowance on a paid plan; they keep working after your premium reports are exhausted. Second, they still count into the same number, so the top-bar figure can read higher than your quota while light tools keep running. How credits work explains both, and Credit cost table lists every price.

Result#

A result is what renders under the run button when a run finishes. Whatever the tool, the shape is the same: a header naming the target with a verification badge, a row of headline numbers, then the detail grouped into tabs such as Metrics, Graphs, Issues, Recommendations and Data. A View Full Report button right after the tabs shows the whole thing at once and opens a standalone copy in a new browser tab, and a Get recommendations panel turns the finding into a prioritized, step-by-step plan.

Three result states are worth recognizing because they mean very different things:

Reading a result teaches the full layout, and Executive summaries and result tabs covers the tabs.

Saved work#

Every run is saved automatically. Library → Saved Work opens a workspace with two tabs: Saved work, which is your results grouped by tool, and Activity, which is a timeline of everything you have done.

The important property: reopening a saved result costs nothing. Cards carry a "Free to reopen" badge for exactly this reason. If you try to run a tool you have already run with the same input, the app offers you the saved copy first, with a dialog headed "You already ran this" and the buttons Open saved result, Run fresh (N credits) and Cancel. Saved results are kept for 90 days. Saved Work covers the workspace in full.

Plan#

Your plan is your subscription tier. It sets three things: your monthly credit allowance, how many people you can invite, and which features are unlocked. The tiers are Free, Starter, Pro, Agency and Enterprise, and your current one is shown as a chip beside your email in the sidebar and again in the top bar.

Feature gates that are enforced on the server, rather than merely described in marketing material, are: team invites (Pro and above), white-label report branding (Pro and above), scheduled reports (Starter and above), Get Recommendations (Pro and above), and REST API keys (Enterprise). Plans and pricing lists every tier and Full plan comparison is explicit about which limits are enforced.

Integration#

An integration is a connection to an outside service, made once in Account & Team → Integrations. Connecting Google Search Console lets the app show your actual measured numbers alongside its estimates. Connecting a social channel lets you publish to it from inside the app. Integrations are opt-in; nothing is connected by default and the Google connection is read-only. How integrations work explains the model.

Terms you will meet later#

These are not core, but they appear often enough to define here.

• Section. One of the thirteen groups in the left icon rail, such as Site Health or AI Visibility.
• View. One screen inside the app. Each has its own address, so a tool page can be bookmarked and shared.
• Workflow. A bundle of tools that runs in one click, in the Get Started section.
• Explainer. The long illustrated article below each tool, teaching the concept the tool measures. See In-app tool explainers.
• Share link. A public URL that renders one of your results with no sign-in required. See Sharing a result by link.
• Target. The domain, URL, or keyword you ran a tool against.