Blog Post Counter

Blog Post Counter + Keyword Mapping Skill

Two workflows in one skill:

1. Blog Post Counter — counts and compares blog post output across a target and competitors, with optional content freshness audit
2. Keyword Mapping — pulls competitor's organic keywords (US, non-branded, informational) and cross-references against target's keyword footprint to surface gaps and opportunities

WORKFLOW A — Blog Post Counter

Step 1 — Resolve each company to a URL

For each company name provided:

1. If a URL was given directly, use it.
2. If only a name was given, run curl -sL "https://<likely-domain>/robots.txt" to confirm the site exists and find the sitemap. If that 404s, do a quick web search for "<company name>" official website to get the correct domain.

Step 2 — Find the sitemap

From the robots.txt, extract the Sitemap: line(s). Common patterns:

• Single sitemap: Sitemap: https://example.com/sitemap.xml
• Sitemap index: multiple Sitemap: lines, or a sitemap-index.xml that references sub-sitemaps

If no sitemap is in robots.txt, try these fallbacks in order:

/sitemap.xml
/sitemap_index.xml
/sitemap-index.xml
/blog/sitemap.xml

Step 3 — Count blog posts

Fetch the sitemap and count URLs that are blog posts. Use this bash pattern:

curl -sL -A "Mozilla/5.0" "https://example.com/sitemap.xml" \
  | grep -o '<loc>[^<]*</loc>' \
  | grep -iE '/blog/|/posts?/|/articles?/|/news/' \
  | grep -v -E '^<loc>https://[^/]+/blog/?</loc>$' \
  | wc -l

Important: Exclude the blog index page itself (e.g. /blog or /blog/) — count only individual post URLs.

Sitemap index handling: If the sitemap is an index (contains <sitemap> tags rather than <url> tags), extract the sub-sitemap URLs and fetch the blog-specific one:

curl -sL -A "Mozilla/5.0" "https://example.com/sitemap-index.xml" \
  | grep -o '<loc>[^<]*</loc>' \
  | grep -i 'blog'
# Then fetch that sub-sitemap and count

JS-rendered sites: Some blog pages render via JavaScript and may not expose counts through sitemaps. In that case, fall back to site:example.com/blog search operator to estimate.

Edge cases:

• Some sites use /resources/, /insights/, /learn/, or /hub/ instead of /blog/ — check the sitemap structure if a /blog/ grep returns 0.
• If the sitemap is very large (>1MB), grep for multiple blog path patterns.

Step 4 — Build the output

Once all counts are collected, produce a ranked table with the target company highlighted:

Blog Post Count — [Target] vs Competitors
==========================================

Rank  Company          Posts   URL
────  ───────────────  ──────  ──────────────────────
 1    Hackmamba        137     hackmamba.io           ← COMPETITOR
 2    Infrasity        137     infrasity.com          ← COMPETITOR  
 3  ▶ Kubiya           95      kubiya.ai              ← TARGET
 4    Orgn             7       orgn.com               ← COMPETITOR

▶ = your company   Total companies analysed: 4

Then add a brief summary:

• Where the target ranks (e.g. "3rd out of 4")
• Gap to the leader (e.g. "42 posts behind the top competitor")
• Gap to the one above (if not already #1)
• Any notable observations (e.g. very new site, or tied for first)

Content Freshness Audit (blog posts only)

Run this audit whenever the user asks about content freshness, recency, publishing cadence, or when it adds useful context to the blog count comparison.

Step 5 — Extract blog post lastmod dates

For each domain, extract only blog post URLs and their lastmod dates from the sitemap:

curl -sL "https://example.com/sitemap.xml" \
  | python3 -c "
import sys, re
content = sys.stdin.read()
urls = re.findall(r'<url>(.*?)</url>', content, re.DOTALL)
for u in urls:
    loc = re.search(r'<loc>(.*?)</loc>', u)
    lastmod = re.search(r'<lastmod>(.*?)</lastmod>', u)
    if loc and lastmod:
        l = loc.group(1)
        if re.search(r'/blog/|/posts?/|/articles?/|/news/', l) and not re.match(r'https?://[^/]+/(blog|posts?|articles?|news)/?$', l):
            print(lastmod.group(1), l)
"

Step 6 — Detect build-time stamp inflation

Before treating lastmod dates as real signals, check whether they are genuine per-post edit dates or build-time bulk stamps:

from datetime import datetime, timezone

dates = [...]  # all lastmod values for blog posts

unique_dates = set(d[:10] for d in dates)  # compare date part only
if not dates:
    stamp_type = "UNKNOWN"
elif len(unique_dates) <= 3:
    # Likely build-time stamps — flag as unreliable
    stamp_type = "BUILD-TIME"
else:
    stamp_type = "REAL"

Build-time stamps = all (or nearly all) blog posts share the same date, usually within a narrow time window (seconds to minutes). This is common with Next.js/Vercel and similar SSG frameworks that regenerate the sitemap on every deploy. These dates do NOT reflect when content was actually written or updated.

Real dates = each post has a distinct lastmod that varies across weeks or months. These are trustworthy freshness signals.

Always flag build-time stamps clearly in the output so the user understands the dates are not meaningful for SEO or content analysis.

Step 7 — Compute freshness buckets

Using today's date, bucket each blog post's lastmod into:

from datetime import datetime, timezone

today = datetime.now(timezone.utc)
buckets = {"<30d": 0, "30-90d": 0, "91-180d": 0, "181-365d": 0, ">365d": 0}

for date_str in lastmod_dates:
    dt = datetime.fromisoformat(date_str.replace('Z', '+00:00'))
    if dt.tzinfo is None:
        dt = dt.replace(tzinfo=timezone.utc)
    days = (today - dt).days
    if days < 30: buckets["<30d"] += 1
    elif days < 90: buckets["30-90d"] += 1
    elif days < 180: buckets["91-180d"] += 1
    elif days < 365: buckets["181-365d"] += 1
    else: buckets[">365d"] += 1

Also compute:

• Newest post date and days since
• Oldest post date
• Monthly publishing cadence — group posts by YYYY-MM to show volume over time
• Days since last publish — the key staleness metric

Step 8 — Freshness output

Produce a per-domain freshness summary alongside (or below) the blog count table. Use the visualiser to render a side-by-side comparison widget when comparing multiple domains. The widget must show:

1. Stamp type badge — "Build-time stamps ⚠️" or "Real dates ✓"
2. Key stats — total posts, newest post date, days since newest, unique date count
3. Freshness bar chart — one bar per bucket showing count and percentage
4. Monthly publishing activity — small bar chart by month (blog posts only, last 12 months)
5. Alert banners:
   • Build-time stamps → warning banner explaining the dates are not real edit dates
   • No posts in 90+ days → warning banner flagging the content gap
   • Real dates with recent posts → info banner confirming trustworthy signal

SEO freshness interpretation to include in the summary:

• Build-time stamps: note that Google ignores inflated lastmod dates and they provide no freshness signal
• Real dates, posts < 30 days: strong freshness signal, good for SEO
• Real dates, no posts 90+ days: content gap, likely losing freshness ranking signals to competitors who publish regularly
• Real dates, bulk publish spike followed by drop: flag the pattern (migration or sprint, not sustained cadence)

Notes (Workflow A)

• Always count from the sitemap — it's the most accurate and complete source.
• Robots.txt is always the first place to look for the sitemap URL.
• The /blog index page should never be counted as a post.
• If a company has no blog section at all, report 0 and note it.
• Sitemap data can lag real-time by days; note this if relevant.
• Run all company lookups in sequence (one bash block per company) to avoid hitting rate limits.
• For freshness: always filter to blog post URLs only — exclude static pages, service pages, glossary, etc.
• Never treat build-time stamps as real freshness data. Always detect and flag them.

WORKFLOW B — Keyword Mapping

Maps a competitor's organic keyword footprint against a target domain to surface content gaps and ranking opportunities.

Step 1 — Pull domain metrics

Pull org_keywords and org_traffic for both competitor and target via Ahrefs site-explorer-metrics:

tool: site-explorer-metrics
params:
  target: <domain>
  mode: subdomains
  date: <latest>
  select: org_keywords, org_traffic

Do this for both domains. The org_keywords count tells you how many batches you'll need to capture the full keyword set.

Step 2 — Pull competitor keywords

Pull the competitor's full keyword set using Ahrefs site-explorer-organic-keywords with these fixed filters:

tool: site-explorer-organic-keywords
params:
  target: <competitor domain>
  country: us
  mode: subdomains
  is_branded: false
  is_informational: true
  limit: 500
  select: keyword, volume, best_position, sum_traffic, best_position_url, is_branded

Pull multiple batches using different order_by values to maximize coverage:

• Batch 1: order_by: sum_traffic:desc
• Batch 2: order_by: volume:desc
• Batch 3: order_by: best_position:asc

After each batch, deduplicate by keyword across all batches collected so far. Keep the entry with the lowest (best) best_position per keyword.

Continue batching until no new keywords appear across two consecutive batches, or until batch count exceeds the expected keyword universe from Step 1.