Competitive gaps — Missing, Untapped, Improve.
The exact keywords your rivals hold and you don't, ranked so you know which to close first. Plus what the opportunity score is actually weighing.
The Gap board is the spine of the brief: the exact keywords your competitors rank for and you don't, ranked so you know which one to close first. Every row is a decision you can make in ten seconds and act on in one click.
What a gap is
For each of your market keywords, ScoutRival runs one live search and reads the results the way a customer would: who's on page one, and where. From that single result set it works out where you rank and where each competitor ranks — and compares the two.
A gap is any keyword where a competitor is beating you in a way you could realistically fix. Nothing here is estimated from a third-party database; it's read from live results, today, for the keywords your business actually cares about.
The three buckets
Every gap carries one of three labels. In plain English:
Missing — the urgent one
Every competitor you track ranks for this. You don't appear at all. The whole field has staked a claim and your name isn't on it. The evidence line says exactly that: “All 4 competitors rank for this — you don't appear in the top results.”
Missing gaps are scored up deliberately, so they float to the top of the board.
Untapped — the opening
Some of your rivals rank for it. Not all. You don't. “2 of 4 competitors rank for this — you don't yet.”
Less urgent than Missing, and often easier: the ground isn't fully taken.
Improve — the reclaim
You do rank for it — but below every competitor who also ranks. “You rank for this, but below every competitor that also ranks — an easy position to reclaim.”
These are usually the cheapest wins on the board. The page already exists; it just needs to be better than theirs.
What is deliberately not shown
The board only lists keywords you can act on. Three situations are not gaps, and are filtered out before you ever see them:
- You lead — you out-rank every competitor. That's a win, not a task.
- You're level — you and your rivals both rank. Table stakes; nothing to chase.
- Nobody ranks — not you, not them. If the whole field is absent from the results, the keyword probably isn't worth the fight.
This is why the board is short. It's a to-do list, not a report.
The opportunity score
The number on the right of each row — 7.4 opp. — is the opportunity score, from 0 to 10. It exists to answer one question: of everything on this board, which one first?
It weighs three things together, and adds a nudge for urgency:
| Input | What raises it |
|---|---|
| Business value | Keywords with buying intent. Someone searching “emergency boiler repair near me” is worth more than someone searching “how does a boiler work”. Terms that fit your services closely score higher again. |
| Demand | Real signals that people are actually searching this — plus a full, competitive results page, which tells you the term matters to somebody. |
| Winnability | How weakly your rivals hold it. A keyword where one competitor scrapes into the top ten is far more winnable than one where all four own the top three. |
| Urgency bonus | A Missing gap gets a bigger bump than an Untapped or Improve gap, so “everyone has this but you” outranks “someone has this” at similar value. |
You'll also see small chips on some rows — buy-intent or commercial. Those are the keyword's intent, and they're the biggest driver of business value. A buy-intent gap with a middling score is usually still worth doing before an informational gap with a high one.
Don't over-think the decimal. Take the top row. If it's Missing and buy-intent, that's your article this week. The score exists so you don't spend twenty minutes choosing.
“Turn into content →”
Every gap row has one. It opens BlogCraft with the keyword already loaded as your target — and the keyword's intent carried across, so the article gets written for the right kind of reader from the first line.
That's the whole point of the board: you go from seeing the gap to closing it without retyping anything.
How often it refreshes
Gaps recompute at most once every 48 hours — not on every brief. There's no benefit to re-running the same searches every morning, and the results wouldn't move.
The engine needs three things to produce anything:
- At least one competitor with a website. Rivals with no URL can't be found in results, so they can't be compared against.
- Market keywords from your Brand Engine. Those come from your services — which is why an empty services list produces an empty board. Products & Services →
- Your own website URL, so we know what “you” looks like in a results page.
The board shows the top six gaps. The engine keeps a deeper ranked list behind them, so as you close the top ones, the next ones surface.
When the board is empty
It says: “No open keyword gaps right now.” Three possible reasons, in order of likelihood:
- Your Brand Engine hasn't finished building. No market keywords means nothing to search for. Check the Brand Engine panel at the bottom of your brief.
- Your services list is empty. Same root cause, one step further up. Fix that first →
- You genuinely out-rank your rivals on everything we track. Enjoy it, then add a couple of harder competitors.
Whole content themes — as opposed to single keywords — are handled by the Topic Gaps card directly below the board. Topic gaps & differentiation →