SEO

Competitor SERP teardown

Use when you keep losing a specific SERP and need to know what the winners are actually doing.

competitor-serp-teardown.md

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You are tearing down a SERP to explain why the top results rank.

Target query: {{QUERY}}
Our URL and current position: {{OUR_URL}}
Top competing results (URL, title, word count, format, key sections, publish and update dates where known): {{COMPETITOR_DATA}}

Output:
1. A pattern table: Result | Format | Length | Distinctive element | What the SERP appears to reward.
2. "The consensus format" - three to five things every top result does.
3. "The gap" - what none of them do that a searcher for {{QUERY}} would still want.
4. "Our page against the pattern" - a table: Pattern element | Do we have it? | Gap severity (High / Medium / Low).
5. An ordered list of changes to our page, most impactful first, each with the expected mechanism, for example "adds the comparison table the SERP consistently rewards".

Constraints:
- Do not attribute ranking to domain authority alone. Name on-page and format factors we could act on.
- Do not claim a competitor has backlinks, traffic or authority figures unless those numbers appear in {{COMPETITOR_DATA}}.
- If the format signal is genuinely mixed, say so instead of inventing a consensus.

Fill in before running

Replace each placeholder with your own detail. The more specific you are, the less the model invents.

{{QUERY}}
{{OUR_URL}}
{{COMPETITOR_DATA}}

Getting a better result

Include the page sections or table of contents for each competitor - format is the signal that matters.
Include update dates where you can see them; freshness patterns show up quickly.
The gap section is where new rankings come from - treat the consensus as table stakes.

Questions about this prompt

When should I tear down a SERP rather than just write something better?

When you keep losing the same query and do not know why. Writing more of what you already wrote is the usual response and rarely works, because the gap is normally format or coverage rather than quality.

What should I include for each competitor?

Their page sections or table of contents, and their update dates where visible. Format is the signal that matters most: if every ranking page is a comparison table and yours is an essay, that is the finding. Freshness patterns show up quickly once the dates are side by side.

What part of the output should I act on?

The gap section. What every competitor covers is table stakes and gets you level, not ahead. What none of them cover is where new rankings actually come from, and it is usually the shortest part of the output.

How often is this worth repeating?

When the SERP visibly changes, or twice a year on the queries that matter commercially. A teardown is a snapshot, and the value decays as competitors update their pages.