Content gap analysis skill

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: 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.

Trend-scout as a gap-discovery input (keyless): feed the multi-source trend scout — Google Trends RSS plus Hacker News and Reddit, via scripts/connectors/rss_monitor.py — to surface rising topics your competitors and you may both miss. Treat each hit as a candidate gap, then check it against your and competitor coverage in steps 5-7. Mark these signals Estimated. See CONNECTORS.md ~~trend database.

Keyless competitor-coverage inventory: python3 "${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/scripts/connectors/firecrawl.py" map <competitor-domain> --search "<topic>" --limit 1000 lists a competitor's URLs ordered by relevance to the topic — a fast Measured coverage inventory for steps 5-7 — and firecrawl.py scrape <url> reads any candidate page as rendered markdown. robots.txt is pre-flighted locally; a Disallow is refused per SECURITY.md §Scraping Boundaries. Firecrawl keyless free tier (~1,000 credits/mo). See scripts/connectors/README.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

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: content-writer.