Content Gap Analysis

Identifies content opportunities by comparing your site against competitors and scoring the gaps worth closing first.

Quick Start

Find content gaps between my site [URL] and [competitor URLs]

What content am I missing compared to my top 3 competitors?

Skill Contract

Expected output: a prioritized gap brief plus the standard handoff summary for memory/research/.

• Reads: your domain, competitor domains, topic/content-type focus, audience, business goals, and any user-provided or tool content inventory.
• Writes: a user-facing analysis and reusable summary.
• Promotes: durable keyword priorities, competitor facts, and pending strategy decisions to memory/hot-cache.md, memory/open-loops.md, and memory/research/.
• Done when: each prioritized gap names the competitor(s) that cover it and you don't; gaps are bucketed into Quick Wins / Strategic Builds / Long-term; and the deliverable includes a dated content calendar entry per Quick Win.
• Primary next skill: seo-content-writer when the prioritized gap list is approved.

Handoff Summary

Emit the standard shape from skill-contract.md §Handoff Summary Format.

Data Sources

Optional integrations: ~~SEO tool, ~~search console, ~~analytics, ~~AI monitor. Without tools, ask for site URL, content inventory, competitor URLs, and business goals. See CONNECTORS.md.

Decision Gates

Stop and ask — gap analysis is competitor-relative and cannot run on demand alone:

1. No competitor domains given and none inferable from CLAUDE.md or prior research → ask the user to name 1-3 competitors, OR offer to switch to keyword-research for demand-side discovery instead.
2. Your own domain/content inventory is unavailable and cannot be fetched → ask for the site URL or a content list, since "gap" requires knowing current coverage.

Continue silently — do not stop for: which 3-5 named competitors to deep-dive (pick the closest); missing optional tool data (mark Estimated/N/A and proceed); ambiguous topic scope (analyze the full overlap and flag the broadest clusters).

Instructions

When a user requests content gap analysis:

1. Define Analysis Scope — confirm your site, competitors, topic focus, content types, audience, and business goals.
2. Audit Your Existing Content — map indexed pages, content types, topic clusters, winners, and weaknesses.
3. Analyze Competitor Content — compare content volume, traffic, type mix, topic coverage, and unique assets.
4. Identify Keyword Gaps — group gaps into High Priority, Quick Wins, and Long-term based on volume, difficulty, and relevance.
5. Map Topic Gaps — compare topic-cluster coverage and recommend pillar / cluster approaches for missing themes.
6. Identify Content Format Gaps — compare guides, tutorials, comparisons, case studies, tools, templates, video, and research.
7. Analyze GEO / AI Gaps — identify missing Q&A, definition, and comparison content that competitors get cited for.
8. Map to Audience Journey — compare Awareness, Consideration, Decision, and Retention coverage.
9. Prioritize and Create Action Plan — deliver an Executive Summary, Prioritized Gap List (Quick Wins / Strategic Builds / Long-term), Content Calendar, and Success Metrics.

Label every metric Measured (tool/export), User-provided, or Estimated (model inference); never present an estimate as measured; if a required metric is unavailable, mark it N/A — do not invent it.

Quality bar: every gap names the competitor that covers it, its volume or traffic estimate, and why it is worth closing — never list a bare topic without that evidence.

Reference: See Analysis Templates for the compact templates used in each step.

Example

See references/example-report.md for a full SaaS marketing sample.

Advanced Analysis

Competitive Cluster Comparison

Compare our topic cluster coverage for [topic] vs top 5 competitors

Temporal Gap Analysis

What content have competitors published in the last 6 months that we haven't covered?

Intent-Based Gaps

Find gaps in our [commercial/informational] intent content

Tips for Success

Focus on actionable gaps, respect execution constraints, and include GEO opportunities instead of only traditional search gaps.

Save Results

Write path: memory/research/content-gap-analysis/YYYY-MM-DD-<topic>.md; promote durable gap priorities and competitor facts to memory/hot-cache.md. See Skill Contract §Save Results Template.

Reference Materials

• Analysis Templates — Gap-analysis templates
• Gap Analysis Frameworks — Audit and prioritization frameworks
• Example Report — Worked sample

Next Best Skill

Primary: seo-content-writer.