Category rank

Category rank is an agency's position by lifetime earnings among the agencies Upwork Insights has indexed in one of Upwork's agency directory categories, so the same agency holds a separate rank in every category it is listed in.

Upwork's agency directory files each agency under one or more categories, such as SEO agencies or machine learning companies. The index crawls the directory category by category and records which categories listed each agency; where no category listed it, the index infers categories from the services the agency describes and marks them as inferred. At each build the members of a category are sorted by total earned, hidden earnings last, and numbered from 1. An agency listed in four categories has four category ranks, and they usually differ.

Category rank is the figure a visitor most often wants, because nobody hires "the biggest agency on Upwork"; they hire the biggest, or best-reviewed, in the category they searched. It is also why the directory comes first in the crawl: the first thing a visitor sees is a ranking inside a category, not a global list dominated by one vertical.

A category rank is only as complete as that category's crawl. The index adds a category only once it has been read completely, so a category page is never half a list, but a category ceiling in Upwork's directory means the very largest categories cannot be listed in full. A rank of 1 in a category with forty indexed agencies says less than rank 20 in one with two thousand.