Keyword difficulty

Upwork shows competition one job at a time. A post's activity panel gives proposals as a range of those "currently being considered by the client", and the exact count, with how many were opened and messaged, is shown only to Freelancer Plus subscribers and covers organic proposals only. Upwork publishes nothing per keyword.

The score turns those snapshots into a keyword figure. An hourly sweep of open jobs records each job's proposal count as it ages, and the reading nearest twelve hours is kept as proposals at 12 hours. For a keyword, those readings are averaged over the jobs it matched in the last 30 days and scaled so that an average of 60 proposals is 100. The bands: under 25 is Easy, under 50 Medium, under 75 Hard, and the rest Very hard.

Three rules keep it honest.

• A job without a twelve-hour reading is left out, never counted as zero.
• Fewer than ten measured jobs is flagged as a thin sample.
• The 60-proposal ceiling is a judgment, chosen to separate crowded keywords from ordinary ones, and it may be revisited as more keywords are measured.

What it measures is competition for the client's attention, not the chance of a hire. A Very hard keyword can still reward an agency whose keyword rank and case studies are strong, and an Easy one can be quiet because clients there rarely hire.

How Upsight uses it. Difficulty sits beside search volume for every tracked keyword, read like the pair of tiles in a search console, and the same twelve-hour snapshots let a late-bidding campaign act on a job's measured competition.