External footprint

Some gaps cannot be fixed on your own page, because they live in how known your domain is. The external footprint card compares public footprint signals for your domain and the most-cited competitor domains.

The three signals

1. Brand searches per month: how often people search for the brand by name
2. Referring domains: how many distinct domains link to it
3. Domain rank: an authority score where lower is stronger

How to read the comparison

A competitor with several times your referring domains is winning an authority race that content alone will not close; it tells you that link earning and digital PR belong in your plan. A competitor with much higher brand-search volume has demand the AI notices: people asking about them by name reinforces their presence in answers.

The comparison also explains audit verdicts: when content quality is at parity but citations go to the competitor anyway, footprint is usually the reason, and the earned-media pages are the bridge.

Data freshness

Footprint signals are fetched once per month as part of your audits; the card itself never triggers a lookup. It shows the month the data is from, and pending state until your next audit refreshes it.