Page one

Upwork's talent search lets a client search by keyword and narrow the results by hourly rate, skills, feedback, availability, languages and more. Upwork does not publish how the order is decided, and it does not tell a profile owner which page they are on. Upsight's scans read the page and position of each result, and they show ten profiles to a page.

Page one is where most clients choosing who to invite look first, which is why Upsight reports positions as a distribution over pages rather than as an average: how many tracked keywords have someone from the workspace on page one, two or three, and how many find nobody in the depth scanned. An average of positions describes no real profile.

What page one looks like is a measurement of its own. For each keyword Upsight reads the visible facts of those ten profiles:

• rate, JSS, earnings and jobs, reported as medians and quartiles, since one outlier rate does not describe the page;
• the share holding Top Rated or Top Rated Plus, and the share showing the Availability badge;
• the share whose title contains the keyword, and the skills two or more of them list.

A tracked profile is then compared with that picture, and a gap is flagged only where page one clearly has something the profile lacks.

Page one also depends on the filter. A country or agency filter produces a different first page, and each scan reflects the filter it ran with.

How Upsight uses it. The rank tracker counts keywords on page one, and the Ranking Coach reads what page one shows when it explains where a profile sits; see keyword rank and rank movement.