Use Ahrefs' AI Features for Competitive Content Analysis

What This Does

Ahrefs' built-in AI features help you identify exactly what your content is missing compared to top-ranking competitors — and grade your existing content against SERP benchmarks — without manual cross-referencing.

Before You Start

• You have an active Ahrefs subscription (Lite or above)
• You have a specific URL or keyword you want to analyze
• You're logged into Ahrefs

Steps

1. Run a Content Gap analysis for keyword opportunities

Navigate to Site Explorer → enter your domain → Content Gap. In the "Show keywords that the below targets rank for" box, enter 3-5 competitor domains. Click Show keywords.

What you should see: A list of keywords your competitors rank for that your site doesn't — sorted by traffic potential.

2. Filter for realistic opportunities

Click Filters and set: KD (Keyword Difficulty) under 40, Volume above 100. This surfaces keywords that are achievable and worth targeting.

What you should see: A tighter list of genuine content gap opportunities, often 50-200 keywords. Export this to CSV.

3. Use the AI Content Grader (via Site Audit)

Go to Site Audit → select your project → Pages report. Find a page you want to optimize. Click into the page, then navigate to the On-page SEO tab. Scroll to find the Content Score section — Ahrefs grades your content against the top-ranking pages for your target keyword and shows which topical areas are underrepresented.

What you should see: A score (0-100) and a list of subtopics covered by competitors that your page is missing.

Troubleshooting: If you don't see a Content Score, make sure the page has a target keyword assigned. Click Set target keyword at the top of the page report.

4. Take the content gap list to your chatbot

Export the list of missing subtopics from Ahrefs. Open ChatGPT or Claude and paste: "Here are the topical areas my competitors cover that my article about [topic] is missing: [paste list]. Write 2-3 paragraphs covering each missing topic that I can add to my article."

What you get: Ready-to-add content sections that close the gap and improve your Ahrefs content score.

Real Example

Scenario: Your article "How to do a technical SEO audit" ranks #8. Ahrefs Content Grader shows you're missing coverage of Core Web Vitals, crawl budget optimization, and JavaScript rendering issues — all topics the top 3 results cover.

What you do: Export those 3 missing topics → paste into Claude → get 3 new H2 sections drafted → paste into your article → re-run the Content Grade. Score improves from 62 to 81.

Tips

• Run Content Gap analysis monthly — competitors' new content can shift which keywords are gaps.
• For fresh content ideas, use Ahrefs' Keyword Ideas tool with AI clustering: enter a seed keyword and click Clusters by Parent Topic to see pre-grouped content opportunities.
• Cross-reference Content Gap output with Google Search Console data: prioritize gaps where you already have some impressions but no clicks (low CTR + ranking position 8+).

Tool interfaces change — if a feature has moved, look for similar AI/insights options in the Site Audit and Site Explorer sections.