Content gaps: topic clusters your site does not cover

What a content gap is

A content gap is a topic cluster with search demand that sits next to your existing content and has no page of its own. Where a keyword gap is one term, a cluster is a group of related questions that one good page could answer together.

Adjacency is what makes them worth doing first. A cluster next to something you already rank for benefits from the topical standing you have, so a new page there starts from a better position than one on an unrelated subject.

What squirrel checks

The rule is site-wide and reads a result the cloud content-gaps service produced before the rules ran. It emits up to two checks:

• content-gaps is skipped when no result is available, because the rule was not enabled or the service skipped it. Message: Content gap analysis skipped, with a readable skip reason.
• content-gaps passes when the service found none. Message: No content gaps found.
• content-gaps reports info with the count. Message: 6 content gap topics found, or 1 content gap topic found for one.
• content-gaps-high-volume warns when more than 20 clusters each have at least 500 combined monthly searches. Message: 21 high-volume content gap topics (≥500 combined searches/mo) — significant uncovered demand.

Severity for the rule is info and the weight is 1. It is disabled by default and costs 25 credits per audit when enabled.

How to fix it

Plan a page per cluster rather than per keyword, starting with the highest combined volume. A guide, a comparison or a genuine FAQ usually covers a cluster better than several thin pages splitting it.

Link the new page from the existing content it sits next to. That is what connects it to the standing that made the cluster worth writing.

Options

Configuration example

[rule_options."gaps/content"]
country = "AU"
language = "en"
competitors = ["competitor.com", "other.example"]

Enable / disable

This rule is opt-in - enable it explicitly:

[rules]
enable = ["gaps/content"]

Related rules

• gaps/keywords: individual terms rather than clusters.
• content/article-links: linking a new page into the site.
• content/thin-vs-site-norm: existing pages that under-cover their topic.
• links/orphan-pages: making sure the new pages are reachable.

Gap Analysis findings ship in every audit next to the SEO, performance and agent experience rules. See Fix SEO issues with AI for how an agent works through a report.

References

• Creating helpful, reliable content, Google Search Central
• SEO starter guide, Google Search Central

Check your site

Run squirrel audit https://example.com and open the Gap Analysis section of the report. Each gap cluster is listed with its combined search volume. Local audits are free.