Opportunity
An opportunity is a place where AI answers leave you out, or rank you low, even though you have good reason to be named there.
An opportunity is a place where the AI platforms leave you out, or put you low, when you have a good reason to be there. It might be a topic you sell into, a quality customers care about, or a page that names your competitors and not you.
Every brand has more gaps than time. Calling some of them opportunities is a way to sort them, so you spend your week on the gaps worth closing and leave the rest.
What makes a gap worth chasing
A gap on its own isn't an opportunity. If you don't sell espresso machines, it doesn't matter that the answers about espresso machines never name you.
Three things turn a gap into an opportunity. The subject matters to your customers. You have something true to say about it. And the answers already name brands like yours, so there's room for you.
For example, say Fernhill Coffee is named in 40% of answers about coffee subscriptions but only 5% of answers about office coffee, where Kestrel Roasters is named in 45%. Fernhill sells office coffee and has the reviews to back it up. That 40-point gap on a subject it already serves is an opportunity. A gap on cold brew kits, which Fernhill doesn't sell, isn't.
How to work an opportunity
Start with the answers. Read the ones that leave you out and look at the pages they used. Often the fix is on someone else's site: a list article that names three competitors, a directory you're missing from, a review site with few reviews of you.
Then fix the cause, wait for the platforms to pick up the change, and check whether the gap closed.
Opportunities in AnswerOrbit
The This week tab in Recommendations picks up to three topics where you have the most to gain right now: the ones where you're furthest behind the leading competitor, or where you've fallen furthest since the week before. The Gaps tab in Sources lists the pages that name a competitor and not you, each with a score out of 100.