Picture this. You open a competitor’s website, scroll through it for ten minutes, feel vaguely inadequate, close the tab, and do nothing with any of it.
That’s what most people call competitive research. A light dose of anxiety dressed up as strategy.
One guy on Reddit had a different idea. He pasted his competitor’s entire site into Claude and asked one question: what gap are they leaving wide open? What came back gave him three months of content ideas in a single conversation. He didn’t just learn what his competitor was doing. He learned exactly what their audience wanted that they weren’t getting.
That’s the move. And it takes about fifteen minutes.
🧠 Why This Works
Most content strategy runs on imitation. You look at what’s working for others and try to build a slightly better version of it. Better production, better headlines, more posts per week. Same ideas, shinier packaging.
The gap approach flips this completely. Instead of competing on their turf, you find the questions their audience is already asking that nobody’s answering. That’s not a content idea. That’s a positioning move.
Think about what a competitor’s site actually is. It’s a document of everything they chose to say. Which means it’s also a document of everything they chose not to say. Those silences are loud if you know how to listen for them.
A summary tells you what they cover. A gap tells you what their readers are still waiting for after they leave the site. Big difference. One gives you a report on your competition. The other gives you a recruiting pitch for their audience.
🎯 How To Do It
The prompt is simple. Paste the competitor’s copy (or a URL if your tool browses) and run this:
Here’s a competitor’s website and recent content:
[paste the copy, or the URL if your tool browses]Find the gap. Tell me: what their audience clearly cares about that this barely addresses, the questions they leave unanswered, and the angle they’re all avoiding because it’s harder to talk about.
Then give me 10 content ideas built on those gaps that would pull their audience toward me.
Works on both Claude and ChatGPT. The keyword is “gap,” not “summary.” That single word change is what shifts the output from a report about your competitor to a roadmap for your own content.
If their site is long, don’t worry about pasting everything. Their homepage, their most linked blog posts, and their about page will give you 80% of what you need. That’s usually where brands put their loudest claims and their most obvious blind spots. The blog posts show what they think their audience cares about. The about page shows what they want to be known for. The gap between those two things is often your first content idea right there.
One more thing: do this for their newsletter if they have one. Sign up, grab a few recent issues, paste those in too. A website is the polished version. A newsletter is where you see what they’re actually leaning into week after week, which is where the real gaps tend to hide.
💡 Tips and Tricks
Run it on three competitors, not one. Patterns that show up across all three point to real white space in your market, not just one brand’s blind spot. One gap could be a quirk. Three gaps pointing in the same direction is a signal worth building a content strategy around.
Pay extra attention to the “harder to talk about” angle. That’s where the most interesting content lives, because most brands avoid it. Which means the audience is absolutely starving for someone who will just say it. The uncomfortable truth in your niche that everyone knows but nobody publishes is almost always your highest-performing content waiting to happen.
After you get the 10 ideas, ask Claude to group them by theme and suggest a publishing order. You’ll have a 90-day calendar before your coffee gets cold.
And once you’ve published a few pieces built on those gaps, paste them back into Claude alongside the competitor’s content and ask: am I actually filling the gap or starting to sound like them? It keeps you honest. A lot of people start strong on this strategy and slowly drift back toward imitation without noticing.
🚀 Try It Today
Open a competitor’s site right now. Copy their homepage. Paste it in. Ask for the gap.
You’ve been reading that site the wrong way this whole time. Stop feeling behind when you look at it and start seeing it as raw material. Every page they published is a data point about what their audience is drawn to, and every gap in that site is a door they left open for you.
That competitor you’ve been quietly intimidated by? They just handed you your next quarter of content.
I pasted a competitor’s entire website into ChatGPT and asked it to find the gap they’re leaving wide open. It handed me my next three months of content.
by u/Professional-Rest138 in ChatGPTPromptGenius