Save rate is the share of viewers who bookmarked a post to come back to later, out of everyone who saw it. Saving is one of the strongest signals a platform reads, because it means someone wanted the content again rather than only reacting to it once.
There is no single official formula for it: different tools divide saves by reach, by impressions or by views, so one save rate is only comparable to another calculated the same way.
A high save rate on a post that did not get many likes is itself a finding: it says the content was judged worth keeping, not just worth a passing reaction.
Because it has no fixed formula, the useful comparison is always against an account's own past posts calculated the same way, not against a number quoted from somewhere else built on a different platform's own definition of a save.
A common mistake is comparing a save rate pulled from one tool against a figure from another without checking how each one calculates it — since there is no fixed formula, two numbers that look close can be measuring genuinely different things.
A high save rate paired with modest reach is worth noticing rather than dismissed as a small result: it can mean a smaller audience found something worth keeping, which is a different, and sometimes more useful, signal than a bigger audience that only reacted once and moved on.
Where it comes from
The platform's own save feature is well documented; the ratio itself is mostly vendor and creator-tool terminology built on top of it, not a number any platform defines exactly one way. Hootsuite's own reporting on Instagram saves treats a high save rate as one of the clearest signals a post is worth returning to, distinct from a like.
Read the source: Hootsuite — Are Instagram Saves Really the New Likes?.
What Rankfield reads
The landing page answers this directly, in its own words:
Your account end to end, your competitors, and the wider market around you: posts, videos, captions, comments, rhythm, what you offer. It watches the videos, not just the numbers under them.