Adding the rivals you compete with

A project holds a list of rival domains, and they are what the gap analysis is a gap against. One run measures at most 5 of them, so that is the number worth getting right — the rivals you actually lose traffic to, not the biggest names in your industry.

If you do not know who they are

Leave the list empty and start a run. A project with no rivals at all gets a discovery step first: it asks which domains rank for the most keywords your own site ranks for, and expands the run from the answer. Domain overview’s Competitors tab, opened on your own site in your project’s market, also carries suggestion chips, each with how much of your keyword set that domain overlaps, and “Find suggested rivals” refreshes them — which asks the discovery step’s own question, so a project whose run discovered its rivals this week pays nothing to look again.

What an overlap figure means, and when it is not shown

A chip says what share of your keywords that domain also ranks for only when the two numbers are about one sample — the same market, and a share that is not above everything. Otherwise it says how many keywords were shared and leaves the share off, because two figures from two different asks divided by each other make a percentage that is nothing.

Tracking more than a run can measure

Nothing stops you tracking more rivals than a run reaches. The run measures the first 5; the Competitors tab’s table keeps a rival the run did not measure as a row with dashes in its figures rather than a zero, and Keyword gap’s matrix names such a rival in a notice instead of drawing it a column of dashes, because a column of dashes reads as “this rival ranks for none of your keywords”, which is the opposite of “we did not ask”. The backlink comparison has its own bound: it compares your own domain against up to 5 of the rivals you track.

Removing one

Untracking a rival stops it being measured from then on and leaves every measurement already taken. Share of voice is the one figure that notices: a round of rank checks taken before a rival was added holds no row for it, which means “not asked” rather than “not ranking”, so those rounds are left out of the share rather than crediting a rival with an arrival it never made.