  We revisit the gauge symmetry related to integrable projective
transformations in metric-affine formalism, identifying the gauge field of the
Weyl (conformal) symmetry as a dynamical component of the affine connection. In
particular, we show how to include the local scaling symmetry as a gauge
symmetry of a large class of geometric gravity theories, introducing a
compensator dilaton field that naturally gives rise to a St\"uckelberg sector
where a spontaneous breaking mechanism of the conformal symmetry is at work to
generate a mass scale for the gauge field. For Ricci-based gravities that
include, among others, General Relativity, $f(R)$ and
$f(R,R_{\mu\nu}R^{\mu\nu})$ theories and the EiBI model, we prove that the
on-shell gauge vector associated to the scaling symmetry can be identified with
the torsion vector, thus recovering and generalizing conformal invariant
theories in the Riemann-Cartan formalism, already present in the literature.
