Competitor Page Scout Guide: Run a Competitor Content Analysis by Page Type

A competitor content analysis often ends as a long keyword export that nobody acts on. Competitor Page Scout takes a different route. In one run, it finds the companies competing for your buyers' searches and sorts the pages they have built into five page types. For each type, it shows the keywords you could be targeting. Use the report to decide which page to build next, then check the evidence before you commit to it.

Open Scout at scout.coreaex.com. It is a free competitor analysis tool with no signup: it asks for no account and no email to run a report. The tool is marked Alpha. It reads your homepage and public search data. It does not install anything on your website or change it.

What a Page-Type Competitor Content Analysis Shows

A flat keyword list mixes searches that need very different pages. "Best QA software" and "how to score support tickets" may both be gaps, but one needs a comparison page and the other needs an article. Sorting by page type turns the list into a set of separate build decisions, and each one has its own effort, owner and format.

Scout uses five types:

The example searches are illustrative. They are not taken from a Scout report.

Pages are typed by URL, such as /vs/, /blog/ or /pricing, falling back to the page's top keyword. Keywords are typed by an AI model, with pattern rules as a fallback. Either can misplace an item, so treat the type as a starting point.

Run Your First Scan

1. Enter your site in Your site, for example yourcompany.com.
2. Choose a Market. There are eight: United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Germany, France, Spain and India. Every number in the report is for that market.
3. If your site is new or its homepage says little, add a line to What you sell (optional). Scout uses it in place of the homepage description when it works out what you sell.
4. Leave Depth on Quick unless you have connected Ahrefs (see Get More From Your Own Data).
5. Press Run. A quick check confirms the request comes from a person. A run usually takes about a minute.

While it works, Scout shows eight steps. Three of them are worth understanding:

• Read your homepage. Scout follows redirects and analyses the final domain, and the report shows "redirected from" when that happens. A script-rendered homepage that returns almost no text is rendered in a browser and read again.
• Work out what you sell. An AI model reads the homepage text and your existing rankings, then names your product, category and audience and writes a few buyer searches. If this step fails, the run stops and no further data is bought.
• Sort keywords by page type and relevance. The last step gives every keyword a type and a fit label.

The steps in between check your rankings, find competitors, map their pages, pull their keywords and add keyword ideas. A step that cannot finish shows a warning on its line and the run continues, so read any warning before you trust the totals.

Check That Scout Found Your Real Competitors

If you have been wondering how to find competitors' websites without guessing, this is the step Scout automates. It combines three kinds of evidence:

• the top ten organic results for the buyer searches it wrote, counted once per search for each domain;
• domains the AI model named as competitors when it read your site;
• domains that share at least three ranking keywords with you in the search-data provider.

Appearing in a buyer's search result counts most. The AI model then classifies the candidates. Scout keeps direct competitors (same product, same buyers) first, then adjacent ones (a related product for the same buyers). It drops publishers, review sites, directories, marketplaces and consultancies, which rank for "best X" searches without selling the product. A fixed list also excludes large platforms such as Google, Reddit, Wikipedia, G2 and Capterra, plus government and education sites.

Check the result in the What we understood panel. It shows the product, category and audience Scout inferred, the buyer searches it used, and the competitors as chips. If any of them is wrong, correct it there:

1. Edit the buyer searches so they match how your buyers actually search. Searches you edit replace Scout's own.
2. Untick a competitor that is not one, or add a competitor by domain.
3. Press Run again.

Search data for a domain is reused for up to seven days, so re-running with the same competitors buys no new data. It still counts toward the daily run limit. A chip marked no keyword data means the provider returned nothing for that competitor in this market, so it adds nothing to the gap columns.

Analyze Competitor Websites by Page Type

The report opens with four tiles: competitors, pages mapped, relevant keywords, and gaps. A gap is a relevant keyword where no ranking for your site was found. If your site ranks for fewer than ten keywords, a gap count would cover nearly every row and tell you little. In that case, the fourth tile shows monthly searches in core gaps instead, and the report says you do not rank for any of these yet.

Quick wins

Quick wins is a short list, eight at most, of keywords that pass all four of these tests:

• the keyword is core to your product;
• no ranking for your site was found for it;
• it has search volume;
• its keyword difficulty (KD) is known and at or below the ceiling, which is currently 30.

Scout ranks the keywords that pass by volume relative to difficulty, and moves a keyword up when a competitor already ranks for it. An empty list is a real result: nothing cleared the ceiling, and Scout does not pad it with hard terms. "Quick" describes estimated effort. It is not a forecast that the page will rank.

The five tabs

Each tab shows two tables. What competitors have built lists each competitor's pages of that type, grouped by competitor and ordered by estimated traffic. Each page shows its top keyword and that keyword's monthly volume. If you have pages of the type, a line under the table says how many. Keyword opportunities lists the relevant keywords for the type, sorted by volume. Both tables have a Copy table button, so you can paste them into a brief.

Comparison and alternatives pages

For many B2B SaaS sites, this is the tab to open first. These pages catch buyers who are already deciding between options. A gap here is easy to see: competitors have built several pages of this type, and you have none.

Searches that name a brand with "vs", "alternatives", "pricing", "reviews" or "features" are sorted into this tab. A plain brand search, such as a competitor's name on its own, is different. It is navigational, so Scout filters it out rather than offering it as an opportunity.

Tools and calculators

Tool pages are usually a contained build: one calculator, one template or one checklist. The table shows which tools competitors built and the search volume behind their top keywords. Scout does not show backlink data. If you expect a tool to earn links, check that in your link tool before you treat it as the reason to build.

Use Keyword Gap Analysis Without Chasing Noise

A keyword gap analysis is only useful if the gaps are relevant to what you sell. Each keyword row shows Volume (monthly searches in the chosen market), KD, CPC, Fit, the Competitors ranking with their positions, and You: your position, or gap if no ranking for your site was found.

Fit is a relevance label the AI model assigns to each keyword. Core is directly about what your product does. Adjacent is a related search your audience makes. Off is not relevant to your buyers: job and salary searches, logins, courses, consumer intent, other meanings of the same words. Off keywords and brand searches go to Filtered out as off-topic at the bottom of the report, each with the reason. Open it once to check nothing you care about was dropped.

The filters above each keyword table narrow the list:

• Core and Adjacent checkboxes. Untick Adjacent to see core keywords only.
• Gaps only, which hides keywords you already rank for. It does not appear when you rank for fewer than ten keywords.
• Min volume, which hides low-volume keywords.
• Search, which filters by a word in the keyword.

A practical default is Core only and Gaps only, with a low minimum volume. That view shows what a content gap analysis is usually after: relevant searches where competitors are visible and you are not.

Read "gap" carefully. Scout pulls a capped number of your ranking keywords: up to 150 at Quick depth. A gap means no ranking for your site appeared in the data Scout pulled. It does not prove your site never ranks for that search, especially if your site already ranks for many keywords. Connecting Search Console makes this column more reliable.

Get More From Your Own Data

Search Console

Connecting Google Search Console adds up to 1,000 of your queries from the last 90 days. The You column then keeps the better of your Search Console position and the provider's. Access is read-only and used only for your own runs. Google is still verifying the app, so this is in early access: leave the Google address you use for Search Console, and CoreAEX emails you once it can connect. Early-access connections last seven days, then Scout asks you to reconnect.

Your own Ahrefs API key

Connecting an Ahrefs API key unlocks the Standard and Deep depths. A run started while a key is connected uses your Ahrefs data instead of Scout's default provider, and the API units come out of your own Ahrefs subscription. If you choose Standard or Deep without a key, Scout runs the scan at Quick depth and tells you so.

What is stored

The report is complete whether or not you leave an email. Scout keeps a record of each run, including the domain, what it inferred, the competitors and the report, plus a one-way hash of your IP address for the daily limit. Run data is deleted after 90 days. Homepage text and keyword lists are sent to Anthropic's AI model for sorting. Search Console and Ahrefs credentials are encrypted at rest, and data from them is left out of CoreAEX's internal reporting. The Scout privacy page has the full list.

Turn a Gap Into a Page to Build

Here is a fictional example. A company sells QA software for customer-support teams, and it runs Scout for the United States. The Comparison & alternatives tab shows that three of its five competitors have built "X vs Y" and "alternatives" pages. The company has none. With Core and Gaps only selected, the tab's keyword table shows several "alternatives to [competitor]" searches. Two competitors rank for them, and their KD falls under the quick-win ceiling.

This is a fictional editorial example. It is not a measured Scout result, and it makes no claim about any real product or its rankings.

The team builds one comparison page first, not all of them:

1. Pick the tab that matches a page you can actually build and maintain. Here, that is Comparison & alternatives.
2. Filter to Core and Gaps only. Then pick one keyword where a competitor already ranks and the difficulty is manageable.
3. Open the competitor page that ranks from the Competitors ranking column or the What competitors have built table. Note what the page covers and how it is structured.
4. Write a brief covering the page goal, the audience, the claims you can support, and the evidence each claim needs. A comparison page makes statements about another company's product, so check each one against that company's current pages before you publish. Maintaining SaaS Competitor Comparison Pages covers keeping those claims accurate after launch.
5. Once a draft exists, compare it with the page that ranks using the Content Gap Scanner. Treat what it finds as questions for your draft, not as copy to lift.

Before you leave, use Copy full report or the email box under the report to keep a copy with your brief.

Troubleshooting and Limits

What This Analysis Cannot Tell You

Volumes, difficulty, traffic and positions are estimates from third-party search data: DataForSEO by default, or Ahrefs when your key is connected. They are not your site's analytics, and they can differ from what Search Console reports.

Each run covers one domain in one market. Scout reads your homepage and the top pages that search data reports. It does not crawl your whole site or your competitors' sites.

Competitor roles, page types and fit labels come partly from an AI model, so some will be wrong; check the What we understood panel and the filtered-out list. A competitor ranking for a keyword suggests a company like yours can rank for it. It does not show that a new page will, and Scout does not measure conversions or pipeline.

Continue With the Right Resource

To decide which gaps matter for your buyers, read the CoreAEX ICP-driven content gap analysis framework. To compare a draft with a page that ranks, read the Content Gap Scanner guide. This guide covers using Scout itself.

Run Competitor Page Scout, or see the other free CoreAEX tools.

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