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