Gap analysis

Overview#

Visibility tells you how present you are across your topics. Gap Analysis picks up where that leaves off, showing you the specific places you are absent and, more to the point, which pages got quoted instead of yours.

A gap here means one topic on one engine, not one topic overall. You can be perfectly healthy on Perplexity for a topic and completely missing from it on ChatGPT, and since the two draw on different sources, collapsing them into a single number would hide the only detail that tells you what to do next.

Panels and controls#

The top of the screen gives you two numbers worth reading together. Open gaps counts the topic and engine pairs you are currently missing from, and Open gaps, week over week shows which way that count is travelling. The direction is the more useful of the two by some margin, because ten gaps that have been closing steadily for a month describe a healthier situation than six that have not moved at all. Each entry is also framed in time by Week over week and Current gap, so a gap that appeared on Tuesday is easy to tell apart from one that has been sitting open since spring.

All engines narrows the list to a single engine. It is worth reaching for whenever one engine is dragging your overall numbers around, since whatever fixes that engine usually has to do with the particular sources it likes rather than anything about your site.

Open a gap and you get three things. Absent on tells you which engines it applies to. Cited instead lists the pages the engines reached for in your place, showing the source domain, what kind of page it is, and a badge marking it Competitor, Indirect competitor or Third party, along with how reliably it keeps turning up. Where a prompt has nothing attributable you will see No attributable citations captured for this prompt. Keywords to target then shows you what those winning pages have in common, which is the raw material for a brief: it tells you what your page would actually need to cover.

Cited instead

Prompt: Which project management tool is easiest to onboard a team onto?

Source	Page type	Type	Cited
a review site	Directory / listing	Third party	every run
a rival's site	Product / service	Competitor	every run
an industry blog	Blog	Third party	3 of 8 runs

Create content starts a draft against the gap and carries all of that context with it, so you are not copying details into a blank editor.

The life of a gap

your moveSeerly runs this

1. 1

   A gap opens

   A topic and engine pair where you are absent

2. 2

   You read what is cited instead

   Domain, page type, and how persistently it recurs

3. 3

   You respond

   Create content against it, or get listed where the winner is a third party

4. 4

   The next runs re-measure

   Closing takes several cycles

↺

a gap that persists is telling you the response missed

Interpreting results#

How long a gap has been open matters more than how bad it looks. Engines vary between runs, so a gap that shows up once may be nothing at all, whereas one that persists across several consecutive runs has settled into a position, and those are the ones worth spending real effort on. The same logic applies to the pages cited in your place: a domain that appears once could be chance, while a domain that appears every single run is what you are genuinely competing with.

It pays to read the page type as carefully as the domain. If every page winning a topic is a side-by-side comparison and the only thing you have is a product page, you are looking at a format problem, and polishing the product page will not close it. You need the comparison.

Check who is actually winning, too. A surprising share of the time it is not a competitor at all but a review site, a directory or a roundup, and getting yourself listed on one of those is usually quicker and holds up better than trying to publish your way past it.

Best practices#

• Persistent gaps over new ones. A gap that has survived several runs is telling you something; one that appeared this week may just be variance.
• Commercial weight over gap count. One open gap on a topic that brings in revenue is worth more of your attention than five on topics that never convert.
• Sources before pages. If the same third-party site keeps getting cited across several of your gaps, getting onto that site closes more ground than any single article will.
• Format matched to what wins. Look at what the cited pages are before deciding what to write.

Next steps#

1. Sort by age and start with the gaps that have stayed open across several runs.
2. Open the Cited instead panel and look at what is being quoted, paying attention to how often each source recurs.
3. Work out whether you are up against a competitor or a third party, because the response is completely different.
4. Read Keywords to target to see what the winning pages cover that you do not.
5. Use Create content so the brief carries the gap's context, or write it yourself with those keywords in hand.
6. Come back after a few runs. Closing a gap is not instant, and one run either way will not tell you whether it worked. See Reading trends.

Limitations#

Gap Analysis only knows about the topics and prompts you track, so a question nobody has configured cannot show up as a gap. That is the awkward part: an unmeasured gap and no gap look identical from here. See Prompts.

It also tells you what is being cited, not why the engine chose it. You can see that a review site wins a prompt every time; whether that is down to its authority, its structure or simply its age is a judgement you still have to make.

Closing a gap is not something the product can do for you. It shows you the target and hands you the context, and the work of getting cited still happens on your site and on other people's.