Keyword Gap
Compare your site against up to four competitors, read the five segments correctly, and turn the Missing rows into a page brief for Claude.
Keyword Gap answers one question: what do my competitors rank for that I do not? It compares your domain against up to four rivals in one market and splits every keyword between them into five segments, so we should write about this stops being a guess.
It is the surface most agencies open first, and the one most easily misread. The segments are the part that repays five minutes of attention.
Before you start
You need a research target for the domain, at least one competitor, and owner or admin rights with budget headroom to run Compare. Reading a comparison you already bought is free for everyone.
Run a comparison
Open Keyword Gap
KeywordsKeyword Gap in the left rail, on a website or a research target.
Add competitors
Type up to four domains into the box — the placeholder is rival.example.
At four, the placeholder changes to Four competitors max.
Or accept the defaults
Leave the box empty and Zyan looks them up: first the linked project's pinned competitors, then the Domain Overview competitor snapshot. You will see Looking up default competitors… then Checking for a cached comparison….
Click Compare and confirm
This is a paid, two-click control. The second click carries the estimate.
Start on Missing
It is the first place to look, and the page is laid out on that assumption.
Pin competitors once, in the right place
The competitor list you edit here is local to this comparison. The durable list lives on the linked project under StrategyResearchEvidence. Pin them there and every future comparison, and research itself, starts with the right rivals.
The five segments
Every keyword lands in exactly one segment. They do not overlap.
| Segment | Means | Do this |
|---|---|---|
| Shared | You and the competitors all rank, at mixed positions | Check where you sit. Shared plus a bad position is a rewrite candidate |
| Missing | Every competitor ranks and you do not | The strongest signal on the page. Start here |
| Weak | You rank below every competitor | Improve the page you already have before writing a new one |
| Strong | You rank above every competitor | Defend it. Do not spend here |
| Untapped | Some competitors rank and you do not | Second on the list after Missing, with more noise in it |
All shows every keyword in the comparison and adds a Segment column to the ledger.
Unique is an overlay, not a sixth segment
The Unique chip marks rows where exactly one competitor ranks and you do not. It sits on top of the segments rather than beside them. Its caption also tells you when a competitor filled its stored cap, which means the comparison saw part of that domain's keyword set, not all of it.
Reading the ledger
The stat rail above the table gives you three numbers: Keywords compared, Opportunities — which is Missing plus Untapped — and Total volume.
The table then carries one rank column per domain, yours included. A crown box marks the best position in each row.
The crown says who leads, not whether that is good
A crown on a competitor at position 47 is not an opportunity worth chasing, and a crown on your own row for a keyword nobody searches is not a win. Read the crown alongside the volume and difficulty columns, never on its own.
Filters
Filters re-read the comparison you already bought. They never spend.
| Setting | What it changes | Default |
|---|---|---|
| Volume | Minimum monthly search volume — 100+, 500+, 1K+ or 5K+. | — |
| KD | Keyword difficulty band, 0 to 100, shown as a band chip. | — |
| Intent | Multi-select filter on search intent. The placeholder reads Any intent. | — |
| Export CSV | Downloads the current rows. Under the header More actions menu. | — |
| Export selected as CSV | Downloads only the rows you ticked. | — |
A useful first pass on Missing: volume 100+, KD band low to medium, intent set to commercial and transactional. What survives is the shortlist worth briefing.
Turn a gap into work with Use with Claude
Selected rows become a reviewed prompt. Nothing runs on its own — you see the full prompt, its size, and you press the final key yourself.
Select up to 25 rows
Above 25 the button is disabled and tells you the count.
Click Use with Claude
The composer opens with the selection already summarised.
Choose the outcome
Analyze always goes to the terminal. Implement unlocks the destination choice.
Write the goal
What should Claude accomplish? is pre-filled, and seeded with the cluster's business outcome when you started from a cluster.
Trim the prompt if it is large
Switch sections off until the size line looks sensible.
Read What Claude receives, then send
Send to terminal pastes the brief into the project terminal and takes you there. Copy prompt puts the same text on your clipboard for any other Claude session.
| Setting | What it changes | Default |
|---|---|---|
| Keyword metrics | Includes intent, volume, difficulty, CPC and current rank per keyword. | On |
| Current pages | Includes the page that ranks today and the owning page. | On |
| Competitor pages | Includes competitor URLs that already rank, at most five. | On |
| Gap opportunities | Includes the Keyword Gap rows the competitors rank for. | On |
| Strategy context | Includes the cluster business outcome and supporting pages. | On |
| Run in | Terminal pastes the brief into the project terminal. Available local machine queues an unattended job on a bound desktop. | Terminal |
Send is paste-only, and the destinations have requirements
The prompt lands in the project terminal and you press Enter. Nothing auto-runs. Send to terminal needs the target linked to a Builder project with a configured terminal. Available local machine additionally needs an enrolled website, an active strategy and a project-bound desktop, and is disabled with the reason when those are missing. The prompt always carries a no-commit fence, whatever you switch off.
Your section toggles are remembered per device only, so a colleague opening the same sheet sees the defaults.
A worked pass
- Compare against the three rivals the client actually names.
- Open Missing, filter to volume 100+ and a low-to-medium KD band.
- Sort by volume and read the top 20 rows with the crown column in view.
- Tick the 10 to 15 that match a service the business really sells.
- Use with Claude, outcome Analyze, goal: group these into page briefs and tell me which existing page each should extend.
- Take the grouping back into StrategyIntent as clusters, or straight into the autoblog topic list.
Troubleshooting
| Symptom | Cause | Fix |
|---|---|---|
| The page says Add a competitor to compare | No competitors selected and no defaults found | Type up to four domains and Compare; pin competitors under Strategy → Research → Evidence for next time |
| Compare is disabled before you click | The target's ceiling or your credit balance cannot cover the estimate | Raise the target's monthly ceiling, or wait for the next month |
| Compare is disabled with an owner message | Paid controls are owner and admin only | Ask an owner to run the comparison; reading it afterwards is free |
| The comparison looks thin for one rival | That competitor filled its stored cap | Read the Unique caption — the comparison saw part of that domain's set |
| Use with Claude is disabled | Nothing is selected, more than 25 rows are, or there is no linked project | Reduce the selection, or link the target to a project |
| Send fails with a queueing error | The project terminal is not configured | Use Copy prompt and paste it into the terminal yourself |
| Filters change the table but nothing is charged | Filters re-read what you bought | Working as intended — only Compare spends |