Competitors

Competitors is where you track rival domains and measure yourself against them. It profiles each rival from their published sitemap and robots files, ranks the field by where you stand, and opens any single rival head-to-head. It never crawls a competitor's pages. Every figure comes from each site's own published files.

Tracking a competitor

Add a competitor by its domain. Spider profiles it immediately from its sitemap, so you see the read back at once rather than a pending row. Profiling is sitemap-only. It runs no crawl, uses no AI, and costs nothing.

A competitor stays tracked even when the read returns little. Each outcome is recorded as data, not as a failure:

• Profiled — the sitemap was read, so you get its self-declared URL count and sections.
• No sitemap published — none was found, so size and structure are unknown, not zero.
• Couldn't check — the read was refused, and the HTTP status is shown beside the label. Size is unverifiable, not small.
• Couldn't reach — the site could not be reached, so size is unverifiable, not small.
• Not profiled yet — no read has run. This is not the same as an empty site.

Where you stand

The Competitors screen opens on the whole field. Three tiles summarize it:

• Biggest threat — the rival that leads on the most sections, and how many of those you have no pages under.
• Your strongest position — the section where you publish more than any rival read.
• Most contested — the section where you and a rival publish at a similar depth.

Below the tiles, the Rivals table sets search performance beside each site's published footprint. Search performance comes from Digispot's cloud and covers estimated monthly search visits, keywords, top-10 count, momentum, and the keyword gap. The footprint comes from each sitemap and covers URL count, sections, referring domains, when it was last profiled, and a verdict of ahead or behind on sections. An AI Insights panel ranks the sections and topics a rival publishes that you do not, in the order worth building.

Each figure carries its limits on the screen. Topics are inferred from URL wording, not a crawl. Search visits are the provider's estimate of monthly organic clicks, not your analytics. Positions are a distribution across ranking keywords, not rank tracking.

Comparing one rival

Opening a rival shows the head-to-head detail. A summary table compares you and the rival on search visits, keywords, sitemap URLs, referring domains, and age, with a standing column for who leads. The rest of the detail is organized into tabs.

Head to head

The Overview tab lists every signal both sides could be read on, with who leads and the evidence behind it. There is no blended score, because the signals are not commensurable. Typical rows are the sections you lack, publishing cadence, and markets served. A comparison that is not sound is called out rather than forced. A rival with far more URLs but a large share matched to no topic is not counted as a coverage lead. An AI rival brief summarizes where the rival is ahead and behind, and Next moves turns the section and keyword gaps into concrete steps.

The content gap

The Content tab measures the sections a rival publishes that your last crawl did not find. It sets their largest cluster aside first, because that cluster is often templated pages, and a lead built on templates is a different problem from one built on articles. Each section shows their page count against yours, a share bar, and a verdict of "they publish more", "they have it, you don't", or "you publish more". Expanding a section lists the specific pages, and pages with no match on your site are marked as drafts you could commission.

Two warnings sit on this tab. The gap is matched against the pages in your last crawl, not your whole sitemap, so it can overstate a gap but never understate it. Matches are on URL wording only, so open the pages and verify before commissioning anything.

AI readiness and markets

The AI & markets tab reads from robots.txt and llms.txt directly, so it is available even when a sitemap is not. It compares whether each side publishes an llms.txt and its completeness score, and how each robots file treats named AI crawlers. The markets section lists the locales each site declares through hreflang alternates in its sitemap.

Off-page authority

The Backlinks tab pulls the rival's referring-domain profile from Digispot's cloud. It reports referring domains, dofollow counts, and domain authority. This data is credit-metered, so a live pull runs only when you ask for it. A missing or failed lookup reads as unmeasured with a reason, never as zero authority.

Search visibility and keyword gap

Search performance and the keyword gap come from Digispot's cloud as market standing. They cover estimated organic and paid visibility and the keywords a rival ranks for that you do not. Like backlinks, this is billable and pulled on request. Use Refresh standing to update it. A rival you have never looked up shows no standing until you request it.

Plans and limits