Competitor Experience Audit

Competitor Experience Audit

Capture the brand, UX, and site design that the leading sites in a vertical observably share, and where they fall short. The output is the experience bar a new build must meet or beat, grounded in cross-site patterns rather than aesthetic opinion.

Stack-agnostic. Works on any SiteShape (ecommerce-catalog, inventory-listing, hospitality-food, b2b-manufacturer, and so on). Auto-parts catalogs are the first test case, not the only target.

This skill is the brand / UX / design counterpart to a technical audit like seo-onpage or accessibility-audit. Technical findings are objective (a missing canonical is missing). Design is more subjective, so this skill is deliberately written to make the subjective assessable: every dimension is judged by observable questions about what the leading sites actually do, reported as patterns and gaps, and marked not_assessable whenever the evidence does not support a judgment.

When to use

• Setting the experience bar for a new build in a vertical you have not built in before
• Capturing the design and UX conventions a credible site in the category is expected to carry
• Auditing the competitive field for a critic or strategy review where SEO and accessibility have been covered but design and experience have not
• Naming the positioning opportunity that recurs across the leaders (the gap even the leaders share)
• Pairing with a technical audit (SEO, accessibility) so the competitor review captures both axes

When NOT to use

• Rating a single page or one brand's design taste in isolation (use design-standards or brand-style-guide for production design decisions on a known build)
• Backlink, keyword, or SERP-overlap competitive analysis (use seo-competitor)
• Generating a creative direction from scratch for a new brand (use creative-direction and brand-discovery)
• User research with real participants on your own product (use ux-research, usability-testing)
• Auditing a single page's on-page SEO or accessibility against the audit suite (use seo-onpage, accessibility-audit)

Required inputs

• The vertical and a list of the leading sites in it (3 to 6 sites; more than 6 stops surfacing new patterns)
• Access to the rendered sites (a real browser view, not just static HTML; see "Static vs rendered" below)
• The site shape the audit feeds, if known (ecommerce-catalog, inventory-listing, etc.); this scopes which dimensions to weight
• Any explicit constraint on the build downstream (the brand voice, the audience, the conversion the build will own)

If the list of leading sites is unknown, ask. Picking the wrong field produces an experience bar against the wrong vertical.

Static vs rendered

Some dimensions can be partially assessed from static HTML (primary navigation, the catalog/category surface count, the presence of search). Most cannot. Layout density, brand register, motion, trust-signal prominence, and the rendered hierarchy of the first viewport all need the rendered page to judge honestly. If you only have static HTML for a site, mark every rendered-only dimension not_assessable for that site rather than guessing.