Find keyword gaps across up to five competitors

Each competitor is compared against your site in one market and one language, in the same organic-ranking scope. The comparison is bounded on purpose and the bound is printed on the result: the competitor must rank at position 20 or better, rows come back ordered by the estimated traffic of the competitor's own ranking page, highest first, and at most 300 rows are taken per competitor. The provider bills per returned row, so the ranking filter is what keeps a five-competitor comparison bounded rather than open-ended.

Your site is excluded at the source rather than filtered afterwards: the provider is asked for terms the competitor ranks for and yours does not appear on, which is why every row is labelled “your site was not observed in the provider ranking sample”. That phrasing is exact. It reports what the bounded sample contained, not what your site does or does not rank for in the world.

Up to five competitors, entered as one comma-separated list. Domains are normalized and deduplicated before anything is spent, your own domain cannot also be submitted as a competitor, and the five-domain ceiling is enforced by the API as well as by the form. Eight markets are offered, and the language options for each are read from the provider's own catalogue rather than typed by hand — an earlier hard-coded list was both too long and too short for the same market.

The overlay reads your selected property for the same keywords as exact queries, over a 28-day window that ends three days behind today, and reports four states: already ranking (an average position inside the top ten on at least ten impressions), has impressions, not observed in this run's sample, or the sample could not be read. Where a page can be attributed, the page URL and its own impressions and average position appear beside it.

That number will usually be smaller than the one you get by typing the keyword into Search Console's own interface, and the difference is not an error. The console's query filter defaults to “contains”, which sums every query containing the phrase; this tool asks about the exact query and nothing else. Two figures that differ by an order of magnitude are two different questions, and the row says which one it answered.

A query missing from the overlay is reported as not observed in this sample. Search Console anonymizes low-volume queries and a bounded read can be truncated, so absence is not evidence of zero exposure — and when the read is truncated the run says so rather than letting a shortened sample read as a complete one.

The Search Console half is also checked before any paid work starts. If the session cannot read the selected property, if the property does not cover the domain you entered, if the authorization has expired, or if the shared hourly read allowance is exhausted, the whole run is refused with a named reason and a button to run again without the overlay. Being charged for a run and handed a report with a silently empty overlay is the outcome that preflight exists to prevent.

The download is a keyword import sheet, not an audit trail: nine columns with the keyword first, up to 150 rows, cut by estimated monthly search volume across the merged set rather than a slice per competitor. Column ids are stable English field names so the file can be diffed against an older export and mapped by a keyword importer whose fields do not change with your interface language.

Values that were never measured stay empty. Cost-per-click is the only column rounded at all — to four decimal places, and never rounded down to zero from a positive value — because every other number is carried through exactly as the provider gave it. Cells beginning with a formula character are neutralized before writing, since keywords are arbitrary text from a third party and a spreadsheet treats some of that text as executable.

Two things are outside the file by design, and both are on the page instead: the capture date lives in the filename, and the file does not record which competitor read failed. When a competitor was unavailable, the note beside the export button says so — read that competitor's absence from a row as unknown rather than as an absence of ranking.