How to audit a competitor's content in 90 minutes

A content audit of a competitor sounds like a week of work. It is ninety minutes, because they publish a complete index of everything they have and hardly anyone opens it.

Step 1: get their sitemap, 5 minutes

Add /sitemap.xml to their domain.

If that fails, try /sitemap_index.xml, or open /robots.txt where the sitemap location is usually declared. Large sites split into several files by section, which is convenient because the split itself tells you how they think about their content.

Save the file with today's date in the filename. You will want this again next month.

Step 2: count and sort, 15 minutes

Paste the URLs into a spreadsheet. Then count:

• Total pages.
• Pages by section. /blog/, /guides/, /case-studies/, /locations/, /services/.
• Pages modified in the last 90 days. The lastmod field, where present.

Now sort by URL and read down the list. You are looking for repeated shapes.

Fifty URLs matching /service-in-city is a programmatic local SEO strategy. Thirty matching /alternatives/competitor-name is a comparison play aimed at buyers with intent. Two hundred blog posts with no pattern is a content mill with no strategy, which is good news for you.

This step is the audit. Everything after it is refinement. The shape of a competitor's URL list is their content strategy, stated more honestly than any of their marketing would state it.

Step 3: work out their publishing rate, 10 minutes

From the lastmod dates, count pages published per month over the last twelve months.

Three cases:

Steady. A functioning content operation. Respect it and plan to compete on quality rather than volume.

Accelerating. They invested recently. Something is coming, and the topics of the new pages tell you what.

Stopped. They gave up, or the person left. This is an opening, and it is more common than people expect.

Step 4: find the shape of their best pages, 25 minutes

Open the ten pages that look most commercially important. Usually the ones nearest the top level, linked from the main navigation, or matching the repeated pattern.

For each, note in one line:

• Format. Guide, comparison, listicle, tool, case study, landing page.
• Rough length. Short, medium, long.
• What proof they use. Data, screenshots, customer names, none.
• What they ask for at the end. Demo, trial, newsletter, nothing.

Two patterns to watch for. If every page ends with the same offer, that is their funnel. If the pages have no call to action at all, the content is not connected to the business and it probably is not working.

Step 5: find the gap, 25 minutes

Now the useful part. Three kinds of gap, in order of how actionable they are.

Topics they cover and you do not. Straightforward. Check against your own sitemap. Not everything they cover is worth covering, so filter against your buyer.

Topics neither of you covers that buyers ask about. Better. Sources: your own support inbox, your sales calls, Reddit threads in your category, and the People Also Ask box on your main terms. This is where the genuinely original work is.

Formats they have not used. If everything they publish is a blog post, a comparison page, a calculator or a genuinely researched piece of original data will outperform, because it is a different kind of thing rather than a slightly better version of the same thing.

That third gap is usually the best return and the least pursued.

Step 6: write it down, 10 minutes

Half a page.

• Their strategy in one sentence. For example: programmatic location pages plus a weekly blog aimed at top of funnel.
• Their publishing rate. Pages per month.
• Three topics we should cover that they own.
• One thing we should do that they cannot or will not.

That last line is the whole point. Matching a competitor's content strategy puts you permanently second. The audit is worth doing to find the thing they are structurally unable to do, not to produce a catch up list.

Keeping it current

The full audit twice a year. In between, just diff the sitemap monthly: save it, compare with last month's, and read the new URLs.

Five minutes, and it catches every page they publish and every page they remove. Removals are frequently the more interesting half, because a company that deletes a product page has made a decision it has not announced.

If you would rather not remember, monitoring tools diff the page set for you. Ours, Figo, does it weekly for each tracked competitor alongside their ads, rankings, social, reviews and AI visibility, at $49 a month for three competitors. But the sitemap diff genuinely is free and genuinely takes five minutes, so do that first.