How to do a content gap analysis

A content gap analysis compares the keywords your competitors rank for with the keywords you rank for. The difference is a list of topics you have not covered, or cover badly. It works best when your site already has some content and you can name three to five close competitors. It produces a list of ideas to check by hand, not a ranking plan.

How to do it

1. Pick the competitors. Search the five or six topics you most want to rank for and note which domains keep showing up. Choose sites that sell to your buyers. Skip Wikipedia, Reddit and giant publishers, because you are not competing for the same pages.
2. Run the comparison. In Ahrefs, open Competitive Analysis, choose keywords, put your site at the top and your rivals at the bottom, then click "Show keyword opportunities". That shows keywords where at least one competitor ranks in the top 10 and you are not in the top 100. Set "Competitors positions" to "All competitors" to keep only the terms every rival ranks for. Semrush's Keyword Gap does the same job for up to five competitors and sorts results into Missing, Weak, Untapped and others.
3. Cut the list hard. Remove brand names, topics you cannot speak about with first-hand knowledge, and keywords that do not lead to what you sell. Expect to remove many rows.
4. Look at the results page for each keyword you keep. Search it. If the top results are all big brands, tools or forum threads, pass. If they are thin or out of date, you have a real opening.
5. Group keywords by page. Several spellings of one question usually belong on a single page. Pick one target page per group, and check you do not already have a post that should be updated instead.
6. Write or refresh, then wait. The Ahrefs lesson also describes a variant for pages you already have: set your position filter to 11-20 and the competitors to the top 10, which finds terms where you are close. Rankings take months, so check back after a quarter rather than a week.

Examples

In Ahrefs' own guide, How to Use Ahrefs, the author ran Content Gap for the Ahrefs blog against three competitor blogs. The report listed high-volume keywords that two or three of those blogs ranked for and the Ahrefs blog did not. The author's suggested next step is to run the same check against your own competitors and pick the important topics from the output.

Limits and when it backfires

• A gap is not a reason to write. Google's guidance lists these questions as warning signs: is the content "primarily made to attract visits from search engines", and are you producing "lots of content on many different topics in hopes that some of it might perform well"? A page on a topic you have no experience with tends to read that way. See Google's guidance on helpful content.
• Volume and difficulty numbers are tool estimates. Treat them as a way to sort the list, not as a forecast of traffic.
• Copying a competitor's page is not the aim. If you publish the same outline with different words, you give searchers no new reason to pick you. Add something the other pages lack: your own data, screenshots, a worked example.
• Results depend on your competitor list. Pick the wrong rivals and you get a list of keywords that do not matter to your business.

Questions people ask

What is a content gap? A topic your audience searches for that your site does not answer, or answers worse than a competitor does.

Which tools run a content gap analysis? Ahrefs (Competitive Analysis, Content Gap) and Semrush (Keyword Gap) both do. You can approximate it by hand: list your competitors' blog headings and check which topics your own site lacks.

How is it different from a content audit? An audit reviews the pages you already have. A gap analysis looks outside your site to find pages you do not have yet. The Ahrefs variant above also works on existing pages, which makes it useful when refreshing old posts.

Sources

• Ahrefs Academy: Content Gap, read Oct 8, 2026
• Ahrefs blog: How to Use Ahrefs, read Oct 8, 2026
• Semrush: Keyword Gap, read Oct 8, 2026
• Google Search Central: Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content, read Oct 8, 2026