Every drill headline gives you a grade and a width, and the temptation is to react to whichever is bigger. The disciplined first step is to multiply them. Grade times width — grams per tonne times metres — gives a 'gram-metre' figure that lets you compare wildly different holes on one axis. A hole of 100 m at 0.3 g/t Au and a hole of 3 m at 10 g/t both come to about 30 g·m; on this measure they are the same result, dressed very differently.
That is why a 100-metre intercept at 0.3 g/t is usually not news. It reads impressively long, but a third of a gram is at or below the economic cut-off for most hard-rock gold, so the length is carrying almost no metal. Conversely, a short, very high-grade hit can be all nugget effect and no continuity. Gram-metres cut through both illusions.
The number is a screen, not a verdict — it ignores true width, bulk density, metallurgy and depth. But if a company leads with only a grade or only a width, and the product of the two is unremarkable, you have learned the most important thing about the hole before reading another line.