Product title gap analysis for Google Shopping: find the words you're missing

We just rolled out a full overhaul of the product titles report in Productrise, and the new title gap analysis is one of the most useful additions in this release. It shows you the exact words your competitors are using in their product titles that you're not, based on real ranking data for the query you're tracking.

Most people already know that including your target keyword in a product title helps it rank. Our own tracking data backs that up: products with the search query somewhere in the title tend to rank higher on average than products without it. That part isn't new information.

What's harder to figure out is which other words matter. Top ranking titles often include attributes and related terms that aren't part of the query itself, but still seem to correlate with better positions. The title gap analysis is built to surface exactly those words, and this post walks through how the report works and how to read it.

How the report tracks title words

Productrise tracks every product that shows up for the keywords you're monitoring. That means product listings in regular search results (including AI overviews), AI mode, and Google Shopping. For each of those products, we store the title, price, image, discount, reviews, and position.

For the product titles report specifically, we take every title we've tracked for a given query, split it into individual words, and count two things for each word: how often it shows up, and the average position score of the products that use it. That data gets plotted on a scatter chart, so you can see at a glance which words tend to appear in titles of well-ranking products.

Here's what that scatter plot looks like for a tracked query.

If you want more background on why keyword placement affects ranking, our own real-time tracking data shows that product titles optimized for the query rank higher on average.

Click a word to see real examples

Below the scatter plot sits a table with the same words, sorted by how often they appear. Click any word, and you'll see actual product titles that use it, pulled straight from the search results we tracked.

From there you can click through to a specific title and land in the rankings report with that product preselected, so you can see exactly where it ranked, on which surface, and on which days.

This table is the easiest way to sanity check what the scatter plot is telling you. A word might look interesting on the chart, but seeing the actual titles using it tells you whether it's a genuinely useful attribute, or just a branded or model-specific term that won't mean much for your own products.

Title gap analysis: the new part

This is the section at the bottom of the report, and it's what the overhaul was really about. Title gap analysis compares the words in your product titles against the words your competitors use for the same query, and shows you what they're using that you're not.

Instead of guessing which attributes might help, you get a direct comparison based on who's actually ranking well right now.

Not every word on that list is worth adding. Some will be irrelevant to your specific product, and some might not make sense from a usability standpoint. But it's a shortlist worth going through product by product, rather than trying to reverse engineer competitor strategy by hand.

Two examples from testing the report

For a query like "air purifier allergies pets," the words purifier and air show up most often, which makes sense since they're part of the query. But pet also appears frequently in titles that rank well, and it's one of the words the gap analysis would flag if you weren't using it yet. Deodorizing is a less obvious one. It's not something most sellers think to include, but it shows up in titles from brands ranking well for pet-related purifier searches.

For "noise cancellation headphones wireless," the four words in the query are naturally the most common ones in ranking titles. But over-ear, bluetooth, active, and hybrid all show up frequently too, and none of them are part of the query itself. Those are the kind of words you'd only catch by looking at what's actually working for other sellers, not by staring at your own query list.

How this works alongside feed audits

Productrise's product feed audits check your product feed data, how well it matches your own website, and whether there are SEO issues with your titles, like duplication, titles that are too short or too long, or mismatches with your product pages.

This new Product Titles report is a different kind of check. It doesn't look at your product feed at all. Instead it looks at real search results and what's actually working in Google right now. Used together, the feed audit catches structural problems in your own product data, and the gap analysis tells you what to add based on who's actually ranking.

Both work toward the same goal, which is optimizing your products for Google's shopping graph. That's the system behind product results across every Google surface, and increasingly behind agentic shopping features through the Universal Commerce Protocol.

Where to find it

The product titles report is available to all paid users of Productrise. It works for any query you're already tracking, so there's no extra setup involved. If you don't have a Productrise account yet, the free plan is still the place to start: track your rankings, see who your competitors are, and upgrade when you're ready for the full gap analysis (and many more features!).