Your competitors are showing you exactly which articles work for them. You just need to know where to look.
Every website publishes a sitemap: the list of all its pages, so Google can find them. If you give it to Claude together with your Google Search Console data, it tells you which topics your competitor covers that you don’t, and which of your articles are one push away from page one.
From your competitor to your page one
1 · Sitemap
Claude pulls your competitor’s list of articles.
2 · Content map
It groups them by topic and search intent.
3 · Cross audit
It compares them with your Search Console data.
4 · Rescue
It picks your page-two articles and tells you what they’re missing.
Checklist
You apply the changes, request indexing and measure.
What you need
- Claude (the free plan works) on claude.ai or in the app. For prompts 1 and 2, turn on web search or paste the sitemap in yourself.
- Google Search Console with your website added (free).
- Your competitor’s website: one that writes about the same things as you and ranks above you on Google.
Note
This isn’t about copying text. You’re going to see which topics they write about and what their readers search for, not plagiarize articles. Google penalizes copied content, and it wouldn’t help you anyway: what works is covering the topic better than they do.
The 4 prompts
Run them in the same conversation, in order: each one uses what came out of the previous one.
Prompt 1 · The sitemap
Find the sitemap of [competitor.com]. Check /sitemap.xml, /sitemap_index.xml and the robots.txt, and give me the list of all article URLs (no categories, tags or legal pages).Tip
If Claude can’t open the website, open it yourself: type competitor.com/sitemap.xml in the browser, select everything (Ctrl+A or Cmd+A), copy and paste it into the chat. If you get an index with several sitemaps, open the one for articles (it’s usually called post-sitemap.xml or similar).
Prompt 2 · The content map
Group these URLs by topic. For each topic give me: number of articles, 3 examples and which search intent they target (informational, comparison, transactional). Sort it from most to fewest articles.Now you can see where your competitor is investing: the topics with the most articles are the ones that bring them traffic (or the ones they want to rank for).
Prompt 3 · The cross audit
First, export your Search Console data:
- Go to Search Console and open Performance.
- Set a 3-month period.
- Click Export › Download CSV.
- From the downloaded file, keep Queries.csv and Pages.csv.
Attach both files in the same conversation and paste:
This is my performance on Google. Compare it with my competitor's map: in which topics do they have more content than me or cover it better? Give me a table: topic · their articles · mine · my related queries · opportunity (high/medium/low).Prompt 4 · The page-two rescue
From my queries, filter the ones between position 11 and 20 with the most impressions. For each page ranking for them: tell me what it's missing compared with my competitor's articles on that topic (sections, questions, data, examples), suggest a new title (max. 60 characters, keyword first) and a meta description (max. 155).Note
Why positions 11-20. They’re Google’s second page. Google already likes those articles (it shows them), but they sit just outside page one, where almost all the traffic is. Improving them usually works much sooner than writing a new one.
The checklist: from page two to page one
For each article you’re going to rescue:
- Main keyword in the title, the first paragraph and the URL. If the URL already ranks, don’t change it.
- New title of 60 characters max, with a hook: a number, the year, “free”, “step by step”.
- Meta description of 155 characters max, with the keyword and a clear benefit.
- The missing sections, the ones Claude spotted, as H2s using real Search Console queries.
- FAQ block with “how”, “what” or “how much” queries.
- Something of your own: an image, a table or an example your competitor doesn’t have.
- 3-5 internal links from your other articles to this one, with the keyword in the anchor text.
- Updated date, only if you’ve genuinely changed the content. Then republish.
- Request indexing: Search Console › URL Inspection › paste the URL › “Request indexing”.
- Measure after 2-4 weeks. If it doesn’t move up, run prompt 4 again with the new data.
What it doesn’t do
- It doesn’t give you your competitor’s traffic. The sitemap tells you what they publish, not how many visits each article gets. For that you’d need paid tools like Semrush or Ahrefs.
- It doesn’t guarantee page one. It tells you what to improve; Google decides. Usually several articles move up and one or two don’t.
- It’s useless without data. If your site is new and Search Console has no queries yet, stick to prompts 1 and 2 to choose what to write about.
- Claude can get numbers wrong. If something doesn’t add up, ask it to double-check or look up the figure in Search Console yourself.
Is it worth it?
Yes. It’s the competitor analysis an agency would charge you for, in half an hour and for free. And the page-two rescue is one of the few things in SEO that usually pays off in weeks, not months.