Advanced Analytics
Competitive Gap Analysis
Identify where competitors outperform you in AI Overviews and discover untapped opportunities.
Overview
Competitive Gap Analysis compares your AI Overview visibility against each competitor across all monitored prompts. The feature highlights where competitors appear but you don't, where they outrank you, and where you hold the advantage — giving you a clear roadmap for improving your AI search presence.
How It Works
Citatra compares three dimensions of visibility for every prompt in your workspace:
- Presence — whether each domain appears in the AI Overview response
- Position — where each domain ranks among cited sources
- Frequency — how consistently each domain appears over time
Based on this comparison, every prompt is classified into one of three gap categories relative to each competitor.
Gap Categories
Each prompt-competitor pair falls into one of these categories:
Missing
The competitor appears in the AI Overview, but your site isn't mentioned at all. These represent the biggest opportunities — prompts where you have zero visibility but competitors have established presence.
Recommended action: Analyze the competitor's cited content, identify what makes it relevant, and create or optimize your own content to address the same topic.
Losing
Both your site and the competitor appear in the AI Overview, but the competitor ranks in a higher citation position. You have some visibility, but it's weaker than the competition.
Recommended action: Review your cited page's content depth, freshness, and authority signals. Look for ways to strengthen the page to earn a higher citation position.
Winning
Both sites appear, and your domain ranks higher than the competitor. These are areas of strength worth protecting and monitoring.
Recommended action: Continue maintaining these pages and monitor for any downward trends that might indicate a competitor is gaining ground.
💡 Tip
Reading the Gap Table
The Gap Table is the primary view for Competitive Gap Analysis. Each row represents a prompt, with columns showing:
- Prompt text — the monitored query
- Your status — whether you appear, and in which position
- Competitor columns — each competitor's presence and position
- Gap classification — Missing, Losing, or Winning for each competitor
You can sort by severity to prioritize the most impactful gaps, filter by competitor to focus on a specific rival, and export the table as CSV for offline analysis or team sharing.
Closing Gaps
Identifying gaps is only the first step. To act on the insights:
- Use Recommendations to get AI-generated suggestions for improving visibility on specific prompts
- Explore the Semantic Map to understand the topic clusters where competitors dominate and find content opportunities
Revisit the Gap Table regularly to track whether your optimization efforts are narrowing the competitive distance.