Badges and status indicators

Summary#

Metric Vault uses small labels in a lot of places: next to a tool name, on a result, in the top bar, on a saved report. This page names every one of them and says what it means, so you never have to guess whether a word on screen is a status, a price, a promise or a description. If you are only after the tool list badges, Tool status badges covers those in depth, including which tool carries which.

Overview#

The interface follows one rule that makes badges readable: a tool never gets its own color; a state does. A green label always means something is healthy, an amber label always means attention, a red label always means a problem, and a purple label is neutral branding rather than a judgement. Nothing is color-coded by which tool you are in.

Badges fall into five groups.

Tool list badges#

These sit to the right of a tool name in the sidebar. Only 35 of the 92 entries carry one; the rest are plain, which simply means an established tool with nothing special to say.

Two things the badges do not mean:

• They say nothing about price. A LIVE tool can be free and an unbadged tool can cost 8 credits. Prices are in Credit cost table.
• They say nothing about your plan. Plan gates are enforced when you run a tool, not shown as a badge. See Plan capability matrix.

DEPRECATED is greyed out. The other four use the same quiet purple chip, so no single tool shouts louder than another in the list.

Some tools announced with a NEW badge open an in-development page describing what is coming rather than a working tool. Tool status badges lists which.

Plan and usage indicators#

The used figure counts every metered run, including tools priced at 1 credit that are never blocked, so it can legitimately read higher than the number of premium reports you have run. Tracking your usage explains the counter.

Result badges#

Data-source badges#

Shown in a result header, next to the domain or keyword. They tell you what the report was built from.

Tone badges#

A small colored pill attached to a metric, a section or a row. The wording changes with the tool; the color language does not.

AI Search Visibility badge#

On the AI Search Visibility card, one badge summarizes the score out of 100.

Command center indicators#

On the dashboard home screen: a METRIC VAULT · COMMAND CENTER label, a session identifier, a STATUS LIVE dot and an UPDATED <time> stamp. These describe the screen you are on. The dot is not a system health indicator; for that, use System status in the site footer.

Severity labels#

Used on notification rows, on competitor changes and on rank alerts. The same three words mean the same thing everywhere.

A monitored URL's severity gate uses the same three words: set it to Medium and low-severity changes stop producing alerts. See Every notification you can receive.

Item status labels#

Descriptive pills#

Tool headers carry small uppercase pills that describe the tool rather than report a state. They never change based on your account, your plan or your result.

Because these are descriptions, treat a PREMIUM pill as a statement about depth, not a statement about your entitlement.

Common misreadings#

• LIVE does not mean "online" or "monitoring". It means the data is fetched at run time. Continuous watching is Competitor Monitor and Rank Tracker. See What runs automatically.
• NEW is not a warning. BETA is the label for unfinished.
• A green tone badge is about that one metric, not the whole report. A report can be green in five places and red in one.
• The plan chip is not a permission list. It names your plan; what that plan can do is in Plan capability matrix.
• No credits used refers to opening a saved result, not to the original run, which was charged at the time.