A dash is not a zero

A zero is the most dangerous wrong number a dashboard can print, because it looks exactly like a right one. It sorts, it sums, it draws, it fits in the column — and “we never measured this” and “we measured it and the answer is none” are different facts that a zero quietly makes identical. So Rankgap prints a dash where it does not know, and the dash is a rule rather than a habit.

Unknown and worthless are different answers

The clearest case is the opportunity worklist. A keyword the keyword provider reported no search volume for cannot be priced, so it has no value — and a row with no value sorts after every priced row rather than above them with a zero beside it. A keyword that can be priced and comes out worthless does get a zero, because that is a real answer about a real keyword.

The worklist’s own summary keeps the two apart as well: it says what the open rows are worth and how many of them could be priced at all, instead of printing one total that invites you to read it as the whole list’s worth.

“Not measured” and “measured as none” are different too

• A crawl that fetched no pages has no health score. It is not a site with nothing wrong; nobody got to look.
• A crawl whose lab sample was never taken and one where every call failed are two different states on the Core Web Vitals tab, and neither is drawn as a fast page.
• A tracked keyword Search Console stored nothing for shows a dash in the Clicks column. A keyword it stored with no clicks shows the number.
• A monthly search volume this product has never looked up is a dash. One it looked up and found to be nothing is the figure itself, because that is something it learned.
• A conversion figure for a day synced before Rankgap started asking for it is absent rather than nothing, so a window holding such a day has no conversion rate at all instead of a wrong one.

It starts further back than the screen

A rule about rendering is only as good as what reaches the renderer. The code that reads a keyword provider’s answers refuses a field that is missing or the wrong shape, naming the field and the call, rather than filling it in. That is deliberately noisy: a search volume that silently became nothing would be a keyword the gap analysis ranks last forever, with no error anywhere and nobody the wiser.

The cost is that you will meet dashes on a new project, and some of them stay dashes until a week has passed or a connection is made. Where there is room for a sentence beside the dash — a project dashboard’s figures are the clearest case — it says what turns that figure on, and a tool on that dashboard that has not been set up at all shows the button that sets it up instead; in a narrow table column there is room only for the heading, which says what the number would have been. That is a worse first impression than a page full of zeroes, and it is the version we can defend.