Use when you keep losing a specific SERP and need to know what the winners are actually doing.
competitor-serp-teardown.md
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.
Replace each placeholder with your own detail. The more specific you are, the less the model invents.