Competitor Keyword Analysis with AI: Compare 3 Domains Using Ahrefs

Choose three domains in the same search market

Compare your website with two sites that appear for searches relevant to your product. A familiar business competitor can have a very different search footprint. A publisher can compete with your articles even if it sells a different product.

Use Ahrefs' organic competitors report to discover domains with shared keywords. Review the shared keyword count alongside the pages and topics each domain covers. Choose competitors whose search visitors could also become customers of your business.

For a marketing reporting product, a site ranking for reporting templates and analytics integrations is a useful comparison. A site getting most of its traffic from general celebrity news contributes little to the analysis.

Keep the country, snapshot date and domain scope consistent across all three organic keyword reports. Decide whether the comparison includes subdomains. For an international business, run separate comparisons for the US, UK, Australia or other markets where you serve customers. The organic competitors tool requires a country.

Use my connected Ahrefs account to find organic search competitors
for [your-domain] in [country]. Return up to 10 domains with their
shared keyword counts and overlap percentages.

Use this product description to assess relevance: [description].
Recommend two domains for a three-domain comparison, explain the
choice, and distinguish search competitors from business competitors.
Keep any relevance assessment that needs a page review marked as
provisional.

Check the API allowance before pulling keyword reports

Ahrefs API requests consume units from your account. Check the connected account's limits and usage before starting the comparison.

SourcetoMCP's organic keyword report uses a fixed field set costing roughly 34 units per returned row. Three reports containing 25 rows each therefore use approximately 2,550 units. At 100 rows per domain, the same comparison uses about 10,200 units. Actual usage is reported with the result and can differ, including when Ahrefs serves a cached response.

The initial 75 rows are a sample of the domains' highest estimated traffic keywords. The tool supports up to 100 rows per domain and has no pagination. Record the row limit in your report so everyone reviewing it understands the coverage.

Check my Ahrefs limits and usage. Estimate the units for 25 organic
keyword rows from each of these three domains: [own], [A], [B].

If the allowance supports this request, retrieve the three reports
using the same country, snapshot date, subdomain scope and protocol
scope. Record the settings, returned row counts and actual units used.

Build a keyword comparison table

Ask your assistant to align the returned keywords while preserving each domain's position and ranking URL. Keep search volume, keyword difficulty and estimated traffic attached to their source and market.

Search volume belongs to the keyword. A keyword appearing in all three reports still has one market volume estimate. Adding the three copies would inflate demand.

The following example is hypothetical. It shows how to classify the evidence before deciding what to write.

“Outside returned sample” leaves the ranking unknown. Your site could rank for a keyword that falls outside its top 25 or 100 returned rows.

Combine the three organic keyword reports into one table.
Include keyword, country, snapshot date, each domain's position and
ranking URL, search volume, keyword difficulty and estimated traffic.

Use “outside returned sample” for missing domain entries. Preserve
missing metrics as unknown. Separate competitor brand and login
queries from topics relevant to our product. Count each keyword's
market search volume once.

Verify potential keyword gaps

A competitor ranking for a keyword that is absent from your sample creates a research candidate. To confirm the gap, review your existing pages and use a broader ranking report or Ahrefs' native Content Gap analysis.

Ahrefs supports comparing your domain with multiple competitors in its own Competitive Analysis interface. SourcetoMCP's workflow compares separately retrieved organic keyword samples. A native Content Gap export can provide additional evidence for your assistant to analyse. Ahrefs' competitor keyword guide explains the native comparison.

Search Console can also show whether your own site receives impressions and clicks for a candidate query. Record the reporting dates and relevant page. An absent query in a limited Search Console report also leaves uncertainty about coverage.

Classify each candidate as an existing page to improve, a verified topic to investigate for new content, or an unresolved comparison. Keep the verification source beside the classification.

Compare demand, difficulty and product relevance

Select up to 10 relevant candidates for an Ahrefs keyword overview. The report adds search volume, keyword difficulty, clicks, traffic potential and parent topic. In SourcetoMCP, this request costs approximately 35 API units per keyword, or about 350 units for 10 keywords.

Ahrefs metrics are estimates. Keyword difficulty describes competition under Ahrefs' model. Traffic potential describes the estimated traffic of the leading page across its ranking keywords. Neither number predicts the visits your new article will receive.

A reporting product could reasonably cover “marketing reporting template” because the article can demonstrate a reporting workflow. A high-volume topic about designing wedding invitations has little connection to that product.

Use parent topics to identify phrases that belong on the same page. Review the existing page before creating another article on a closely related query. Ahrefs describes this approach in its guide to using competitor keywords.

Retrieve Ahrefs keyword overview metrics for these 10 candidates
in [country]: [keywords].

Group related phrases using parent topics and the available evidence.
For each group, explain the connection to our product, identify any
existing page, and propose either a page update or a new article.
Keep estimated metrics separate from measured Search Console data.
Treat traffic potential as context, without presenting it as a forecast.

Read the search results before creating a brief

Use Ahrefs' SERP overview to inspect the leading ranking URLs, titles and referring domain counts for your strongest candidates. Check its update dates because the report reflects Ahrefs' most recent snapshot.

The report returns ranking information. Reading what each page actually covers requires a browser or page content supplied to your assistant.

Open several relevant results and examine the format readers receive. A query dominated by downloadable templates needs a different response from one dominated by definitions or product comparisons. Check whether the pages include examples, calculations, screenshots or usable files.

Prepare a brief with a specific improvement you can deliver. For a reporting template, that could be a complete column structure, a worked calculation and prompts that update the report from connected data. Claims about a competitor's omissions need evidence from its page.

Use the keyword metrics, ranking results and these reviewed pages:
[URLs or page content]. Prepare a brief for [chosen topic].

Include the main reader task, suggested title and slug, an opening
answer, section outline, worked example and relevant internal links.
Identify which findings came from reviewed pages. Label proposed
sections separately from verified competitor omissions. Describe only
product features supported by our connected tools.

Save a content plan you can check later

Choose three actions from the comparison. For each action, record the target keyword group, country, existing or proposed URL, evidence, owner and review date.

After publication or an update, use Search Console to review the page's impressions, clicks and queries over comparable periods. Record the publication date, indexing status and other changes that affect the comparison. Keep Ahrefs ranking estimates alongside their dates.

The report should distinguish the work completed from the performance observed. A rise in clicks after a page update needs context before you attribute the change to that update.

To start this workflow, follow the guides for connecting Ahrefs to Claude or Ahrefs to ChatGPT, then compare your domain and two competitors using the same market and snapshot date.