Content gap analysis means checking your content against top-ranking competitors
When you know what they’ve done well, you can improve your own page on that topic to improve its organic ranking and potential to convert visitors.
If you’re basing some of your content strategy on organic search, content gap analysis is important. But it’s a pretty hands-on and time-consuming process, involving a lot of cross-referencing and note-taking. That’s where AI can help with the heavy lifting.
AI can compare content and summarise ways to improve
In the demo video above, I talk through using AI to help with content gap analysis for one of our own bottom of funnel pages.
Here’s how to do it.
1. Write your prompt
You need to be really specific about what you want to get out of it.
Remember to include:
- context and background
- the task and its objective
- relevant background details
- how you’ll delineate your content and the content you’re comparing it to – that is, how you show it which bit is which
- what you want the output to be (more detail on that below)
- your and your competitor’s page copy.
Make sure you tell it what you’re looking for
What you need might vary, but useful things to ask for are:
- an analysis of multiple competitor content themes
- identifying the strengths and weaknesses of your own copy in comparison
- example questions to ask your subject matter experts, helping to fill in gaps in your content
- a recommended page structure
- next steps and a summary of recommendations.
If you need help writing prompts:
- check out the OpenAI, or Anthropic prompt engineering guidelines.
- get in touch with us for some bespoke AI training. (Pepsico said: “We were all inspired by the training – you made prompting so accessible and easy to understand.”)
2. Choose your model
For thorough content gap analysis, a reasoning model like o1 or o3 will likely be best. They can comb through and compare multiple pieces of content and draw detailed conclusions from them.
3. Run your prompt
But, don’t immediately treat what you get back as gospel. Read through it carefully to make sure the recommendations are sensible and helpful.
4. Use your original recommendations to critique your new copy
Show what you’ve got to the model and ask it to review it using the original content gap analysis and recommendations. It helps you make sure you’ve covered all your bases, and you can fine-tune your edits from there.
Looking for more ways to use AI for your marketing? We’ve got you covered here.
Want access to the best AI models in one secure place? Get in touch.
Written by Tom Pallot, Head of Marketing at Definition.
