A worklist, and a number you can check

What it does

You name a site and the rivals you compete with. Rankgap asks a keyword data provider what each of you ranks for, lines the answers up against each other, and prices the difference: a keyword your rivals rank for and you do not is a page worth writing, and a keyword where one of them sits above you is a page worth improving.

From there it keeps measuring. It checks the position of each keyword you choose to track, once a week, on its own schedule from the day you added it. It asks what is wrong with the pages of yours that already rank, and crawls the site separately, from its home page up to the plan’s per-crawl ceiling, following its links and its sitemap, so it also reaches pages that do not rank yet — and, when a sitemap lists them, pages nothing links to. It reads your backlink profile and stores each reading, so a change is a comparison between two dates rather than today’s number on its own. And it asks language models the questions your customers would ask, then counts how often the answer names you and which rival it named instead. The toolkit page describes each of those on its own.

Who it is for

Somebody doing their own search marketing for one site, or for a handful of them. The screens assume you know your market and not that you know this product: a figure is printed with the instrument that took it, the window it covers and the date it was taken, so it can be argued with rather than taken on trust.

It suits a shop particularly well, because a shop has pages whose worth is measurable: connect a storefront, sync its posts and attach your Search Console property, and the posts you publish are measured against the search traffic they actually earned. Syncing the store is a button you press rather than something a schedule does for you, while Search Console syncs itself roughly daily: until the first store sync none of its articles is listed, and until Search Console’s first sync they are listed with no clicks beside them.

How a number gets onto a screen here

• Every figure names its instrument. A position this product checked itself and a position Search Console averaged over a window are two different measurements of the same word, so they never share a column or a chart.
• An estimate says it is one. A keyword’s value is a click estimate taken off a published average click-through curve, not a forecast of your traffic — the footer of every page on this site says so in full.
• A dash is not a zero. Where a measurement has not been taken, or there is not yet enough history to state it, the screen prints a dash and a line saying what would turn it on. A zero is a measurement, and printing one for an absence is the quietest way a product can be wrong.
• A difficulty is one of four bands — easy, possible, hard and very hard — derived from a single table, so a keyword cannot be called one thing on one screen and another on the next.

What it will not do

• It will not grade another site’s morality. There is no toxicity score and no disavow list anywhere in it. What it reports instead is a count of referring domains the data provider’s own spam score flags, named as that score and stated over the referrers it actually stored.
• It will not forecast your traffic or your revenue, and it will not promise a position. Nothing in search works that way, and a product that says otherwise is selling the one thing it cannot deliver.
• It will not charge by the person. What a larger plan buys is more projects, more tracked keywords, more keyword searches a day, more pages crawled and a larger budget for looking data up, so adding a colleague to a workspace costs nothing. Some of it is off on the cheapest plan rather than smaller: AI visibility and downloading your data as a file arrive with Starter; product-listing checks arrive with Growth. The pricing page has the ladder.