Content
What it tells you
Your competitors publish constantly — a new comparison page, a batch of case studies, a docs section that quietly doubles. Each one is a bet on ranking, on AI answers, on a buyer who reads before they talk to sales, and most of them go up without you ever noticing. Content is where you catch what the field is shipping and see, plainly, where your own library is thin.
It comes down to a handful of plain readings, worked out the same way for every rival and for you, so the comparison is fair:
| What you see | What it means |
|---|---|
| Content inventory | Every page each rival publishes, sorted into types — the shape of their whole site at a glance. |
| Pages that count | How many of those pages carry real competitive weight, once boilerplate is set aside. |
| Critical gaps | Page types you publish none of, that rivals already have live. |
| Where you’re behind | Page types where a rival is far ahead — as a percentage and a you-versus-best read. |
| Your strengths | Page types where you out-publish the whole field. |
| What’s on track | Page types where you’re roughly level with the market. |
The point isn’t the raw page count — it’s the shape. A rival with forty case studies and a shelf of comparison pages is running a content play you either answer or cede, and that only shows up when the whole library is sorted and set beside yours.
What a check looks like
A check reads each competitor’s sitemaps, sorts every page it finds into a type, counts them, and sets the result against your own site — surfacing the gaps you have none of, the ones you’re behind on, and the places you’re actually ahead. One run reads something like this:
Because every site is read and sorted the same way, the comparison lines up cleanly — you can see at a glance which page types a rival is investing in that you haven’t touched, and which ones you quietly lead.
Every page, sorted into types
The first thing a check does is turn a competitor’s raw list of URLs into something you can read: it sorts every page into a content type. That’s what makes the comparison possible — counting total pages tells you little, but counting comparison pages or case studies tells you exactly what play a rival is running.
Not every page carries competitive weight. Legal boilerplate, utility pages, and the long tail of one-off URLs get set aside, and what’s left — the pages built to win a buyer or a search — is what CompetLab counts as your strategic pages. Each rival gets two numbers: the total pages found, and the strategic subset that actually matters for the comparison. It’s the strategic count the gaps and strengths are read from, so a rival with a huge sitemap of thin utility pages doesn’t get credit it hasn’t earned.
Gaps, strengths, and what’s on track
Every check sorts the whole picture into four plain buckets, so you’re not reading a spreadsheet — you’re reading a to-do list. Each page type lands in exactly one:
A critical gap is a page type you publish none of while rivals do — no comparison pages, no case studies, no integrations directory — each one shown with the leading rival’s count so you know how far the front-runner has already run. Behind covers the types where you’re on the board but well back, reported as a percentage with a you-versus-best read. Strengths are the types where you out-publish everyone — worth saying louder, and worth handing to sales. On track is everything where you’re roughly level with the market and can leave well alone.
The “behind” read is the one that turns fuzzy worry into a number:
| Page type | You | Field best | Behind |
|---|---|---|---|
| Blog posts | 12 | 140 | −91% |
| Documentation | 8 | 95 | −92% |
| Landing pages | 6 | 35 | −83% |
Read a row and you get the size of the hole and who dug the deepest one. A critical gap says start; a “behind” percentage says how much ground — and a strength says where you’re already ahead and should press.
The competitor sitemap view
Underneath the gap analysis sits the raw tally: for every rival, how many pages CompetLab found in total, how many of those are strategic, and how many separate sitemaps they publish. This is the bird’s-eye view — who’s running a large content operation and who’s lean.
| Rival | Strategic pages | Total pages | Sitemaps |
|---|---|---|---|
| Rival A | 355 | 436 | 1 |
| Rival B | 210 | 290 | 3 |
| Rival C | 180 | 240 | 2 |
| You | 120 | 200 | 1 |
The single number CompetLab watches hardest is the gap to the leader — your strategic page count minus the biggest rival’s. It’s one figure that says whether the field is pulling away from you or whether you’re closing, and it’s the one the history charts over time.
The grouped gap cards, the you-versus-best bars, and the sitemap view are rendered in the CompetLab app. The REST API and MCP tools return the pieces underneath — each rival’s page counts by type, your strategic count and the gap to the leader, and the full gap-and-strength lists. The API also exposes a changelog of exactly which pages a rival added or removed between checks, so you can rebuild the diff in your own tools.
A trend, not a snapshot
A single check tells you who publishes what today; the value builds when you watch it move. Because CompetLab runs on a schedule and keeps every result, Content becomes a genuine inventory diff over time — the week a rival shipped eight landing pages, the month two competitors both started a comparison series, the quarter your gap to the leader finally stopped widening. Run History keeps each check with the change in your strategic page count and the gap to the front-runner, so a rival quietly out-publishing you shows up as a trend line, not a surprise on a sales call.
That same check-over-check diff is what powers alerts: when a competitor adds a batch of pages in a type where you have none, you hear about it between checks rather than stumbling on it later.
Content runs on its own cadence, set independently of the other dimensions. Turning it on and choosing how often it checks are both covered in How monitoring works.
Work with it in code
Every quantitative piece here is available programmatically — the same data the dashboard renders.
FAQ
What is Content?
Content is one of CompetLab's five continuously monitored dimensions. It watches what your competitors publish — every page on their sites, sorted into types like blog posts, documentation, landing pages, case studies, comparison pages, integrations, and free tools — and lines that inventory up against yours. Each check reads their sitemaps, counts the pages that carry real competitive weight, and sorts the result into four plain buckets: page types you have none of, ones you're behind on, ones where you lead, and ones where you're level. Because it's monitored, every check is stored as history, so you watch a rival's content operation grow over weeks and get an alert when they ship a batch of pages between checks — rather than discovering their new comparison page when a prospect brings it up.
Where does the data come from?
From each competitor's own sitemaps — the machine-readable index of pages a site publishes for search engines to find. A check reads those sitemaps, discovers the full list of URLs, and sorts each one into a content type by what it is. Nothing is surveyed or entered by hand, and nothing is guessed: it's the pages the rival themselves told the web exist. That's the whole idea — a living inventory of what your market publishes, gathered automatically and kept over time. When a competitor adds or removes pages, the next check picks up the difference and records it as a change against what the last check saw.
What's a strategic page, versus a total page?
Total pages is everything a check discovers in a rival's sitemaps. Strategic pages is the subset that actually matters for competing — CompetLab sets aside legal boilerplate, utility pages, and the long tail of one-off URLs, and counts what's left: the pages built to win a buyer or rank in search. The distinction matters because raw totals mislead. A site can publish thousands of thin auto-generated pages and look enormous while investing nothing in the content that moves deals. Every gap, strength, and comparison on this dimension is read from the strategic count, and the single figure CompetLab watches hardest — the gap to the leader — is strategic-page to strategic-page, so nobody gets credit for volume they haven't earned.
What's the difference between a critical gap and being behind?
A critical gap is a page type you publish none of while rivals already have some live — zero comparison pages, zero case studies, zero integrations directory. It's shown with the leading rival's count so you know how far the front-runner has run. Being behind is softer: you're on the board in that type but well back, and it's reported as a percentage with a you-versus-best read, so you can size the hole. The practical difference is what each one tells you to do. A critical gap says start — there's a whole category of buyer content you're absent from. A "behind" percentage says how much ground you'd need to make up in a type you already play in. The fourth and best case, a strength, is where you out-publish the field and should press the advantage.
How is this different from an SEO site crawl?
An SEO crawler audits one site — usually yours — for broken links, thin pages, and technical issues. Content does something different: it reads your competitors' sites, sorts every page into a type, and tells you where your library is thin relative to theirs. It's a competitive inventory, not a technical audit. It won't flag a slow page or a missing meta description; it will tell you three rivals publish comparison pages and you publish none, or that a competitor's blog is six times the size of yours. And because it runs on a schedule and keeps history, it's built to catch the moves — the week a rival started a case-study program — rather than to grade a single site at a single moment.
How often does it check, and does it keep history?
Content runs on a schedule you set, on its own cadence, independently of the other dimensions — you can watch it closely or let it tick along, and changing the frequency never costs you past data. Every check is stored, so the dimension is really a running inventory diff over time: Run History keeps each check with the change in your strategic page count and the gap to the leader, and a rival's new pages show up as a difference against what the last check saw. That history is also what powers alerts — when a competitor ships a batch of pages in a type where you have none, you hear about it between checks. Frequency is set in the project's settings; see How monitoring works for the walkthrough.