Topic gaps & differentiation.
One card tells you which subjects your rivals own that you don't. The other tells you which subjects are so crowded that writing about them again is a waste of a week.
Keyword gaps are single search terms. These two cards work one level up, at the level of themes — whole subjects your competitors write about. One card tells you what to add. The other tells you what not to bother adding.
Two cards, opposite advice
They're built from the same raw material — the pages and blog posts on your competitors' own websites — and they answer opposite questions.
| Topic Gaps | Differentiation | |
|---|---|---|
| Asks | What do rivals cover that I don't? | What do rivals all cover? |
| Means | Open ground. Go and take it. | Saturated ground. Don't pile on. |
| Action | Write the article. There's a button. | Find a contrarian angle — or a narrower niche. |
| Sits in | Group 1, under the gap board. | Group 2, at the end of the rivals section. |
Neither card renders if it has nothing honest to say. A missing card is information.
Topic Gaps — the ground you're not on
Header: “Content themes you're missing.” Each row is a theme, an evidence line, an opportunity score, and a Turn into content → button that opens BlogCraft seeded with the theme.
The evidence names names: “3 competitors cover this theme in depth — you don't yet (Acme, Northgate, Vertex).”
Rows are labelled the same way as the keyword board — Missing when three or more rivals cover the theme, Untapped when fewer do — and scored 0 to 10 on the same opportunity model, so a theme and a keyword can be compared directly. How the score works →
Up to six themes are shown on the brief.
How a theme qualifies
Three tests. A theme has to pass all of them.
Enough rivals cover it
Normally two or more of your competitors must cover the theme before we'll call it a gap — cross-checking against a second rival is what kills one-off noise.
The exception is honest and worth knowing: if we could only read one or two of your rivals' sites at all (many block automated readers), a single rival covering a theme in depth still counts. With that little to go on, we'd rather show you a real signal than nothing.
You don't already cover it
We compare the theme against your own footprint — your services, your market keywords, your About text, your brand name. If it's already yours, it isn't a gap.
You don't cover it in meaning, either
This is the part that stops the card being useless. The check isn't just word-matching. A rival's theme of “responsive design” will not be reported as a gap if your services already say “mobile-friendly websites” — different words, same thing, and we can tell.
Boilerplate is filtered out before any of that — navigation labels, slogans, cookie notices and calls-to-action never become themes.
Themes refresh at most every couple of days, and your rivals' pages are re-read on a weekly cycle. A brand-new brand will not have this card on day one.
Differentiation — the ground that's taken
Header: “Where to stand out.” This is the card that tells you to stop.
Each row is a theme so widely covered by your competitors that writing another version of it is a losing move, with a badge showing how many rivals cover it out of how many we could read — 4/5.
The evidence tells you which situation you're in:
- Everyone covers it — “All 4 tracked competitors cover this — it's table-stakes. Stand out with a contrarian take or a narrower niche, not me-too content.”
- Most cover it — “3 of your 5 competitors cover this — a crowded space. Differentiate with a unique angle rather than copying it.”
The bar scales with how many rivals we could actually read: with two readable rivals, both must cover it; with five, at least four. Up to four themes are listed.
Every other card in the brief has a “turn this into content” button. This one deliberately doesn't. The correct response to a saturated theme is not another article about it — it's a different position on it. A button would quietly encourage the opposite.
Both need readable rivals
Both cards are built by reading your competitors' own pages. That has two consequences you should know about:
- Differentiation needs at least two rivals with readable websites. You cannot judge whether ground is crowded from a single competitor. With fewer than two, the card simply doesn't appear — rather than guessing.
- Some sites can't be read. Plenty of businesses block automated readers, and some sites are built in ways that hide their content from anything that isn't a browser. Those rivals still show up in the signals feed; they just can't contribute themes.
If both cards are missing and you have several competitors, this is almost certainly why. Adding one more rival with a straightforward website often brings both cards to life.