The competitor gap mirror
The fastest path to ranking for a topic is to write about one that’s already ranking for someone else. If a competitor has eighty posts earning traffic on a topic and you have none, the demand is proven and the playbook is sitting in plain sight. Sitemap analysis is the cheapest competitive intel that exists — every public site exposes one — and pointing an assistant at both their sitemap and your archive surfaces three kinds of opportunity at once: whole topics you’re missing, specific queries they target and you don’t, and areas you cover thinly that they cover deeply. The assistant does the analysis and the production; you supply the editorial judgment about which gaps are worth filling.
What you need
- Specter synced to your blog
- An AI assistant with fetch or web-search enabled (to sample competitor posts)
- One or more competitor sitemap URLs (usually at
/sitemap.xml)
The recipe
- Pull your archive. Run a Specter pull so the assistant knows your coverage in detail.
- Map both sides. Run the self-map prompt over your posts, then the competitor-scan prompt over each rival’s sitemap.
- Compute the gap. Run the gap prompt to diff the two into a prioritized brief of post ideas.
- Approve and draft. Drop topics that don’t fit your brand, then hand the queue to the topical cluster builder (or draft directly). Dry-run and push as drafts; publish on your own cadence, not fifty in one day.
The prompt
Map your own coverage, then profile the competitor:
Map this blog's topic coverage: read every post and output structured JSON of
topics → subtopics → the posts in each, with a depth rating (deep = 5+ posts,
medium = 2–4, thin = 1) and a short summary. Then, given a competitor sitemap
URL: fetch it, filter to blog posts, sample ~30 representative posts to understand
structure, cluster the full URL list by topic, and output the same JSON shape
with post counts, depth, and freshness per subtopic.Then compute the gap into a brief:
Diff our coverage against the competitor's and write a prioritized gap report:
topics they own and we don't (with example titles, strategic fit, and a BUILD /
SKIP / LATER call), topics we both cover but they cover deeper (EXPAND / LEAVE),
and topics we own that they don't (our moat). End with a ranked queue of up to 20
specific post ideas balancing strategic fit, demand signal, freshness, and our
differentiation angle. Each item: working title, target query, why this one,
estimated impact. This is the brief — draft nothing.Cost and time
| Phase | Tokens | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Self-map (200 posts) | ~500k | $1 |
| Competitor scan (30 sampled) | ~500k | $1.50 |
| Gap report | ~200k | $0.50 |
| Drafting 20 gap posts | ~2M | $5 |
| Total per competitor cycle | ~3.2M | ~$8 |
Pitfalls
- Don’t clone. The recipe finds topic gaps, not posts to copy. Always write with a fresh angle — if a draft reads like a rewrite of theirs, your reputation costs more than the SEO gain.
- Strategic fit. “They cover it” isn’t “we should.” Skip topics that don’t fit your audience.
- Crawl politely. Some sitemaps are large and some sites block scraping. Throttle, and fall back to titles-only if needed.
Where to go next
Run it once a quarter, and for sharper signal profile two or three competitors and prioritize the gaps that show up across more than one — those are the proven-demand topics. Run drafts through the brand voice enforcer so your voice doesn’t drift toward theirs.