The rank badge is a live SVG image served by Upwork Insights at /badge/<slug> that shows an agency's name, a one-line stat and its current rank in the index, for embedding on the agency's own website with a link back to its page.
Every agency page lists the embed snippets: one for the overall rank, one for each directory category the agency ranks in, best first, and one for its country. The image is 360 by 64 pixels, with the agency's name and either its earnings and badge or, for a scoped badge, the words "in <category>" or "in <country>" on the left and the rank on the right. A category badge is requested with a category query on the URL, a country badge with a country query, and the plain URL gives the overall rank.
The figure is never typed into the image. It is read from the current index when the badge is requested, cached for up to a day, and so it changes with every index build. If an agency stops ranking in the scope an old embed asks for, because it left a category or its country is no longer shown, the badge falls back to the overall rank rather than showing a stale or made-up number. An unknown slug renders a badge that says the agency is not indexed.
The badge states a position in this index, not an award from Upwork. Nothing about it changes the agency's Upwork profile, and the snippet is a plain image inside a link, so every embed is a backlink to the agency's page here.
How Upwork Insights uses it
The snippets sit at the foot of every one of the 28,921 agency pages and on the claim page, which shows an overall and a country example. Claiming the page is not required to embed the badge, but a claimed page is re-read weekly so the rank it shows is fresher.