Finding the gaps big travel sites miss

I've had that feeling on every site I've started.

Now, for the good news.

The big site tells you where its gaps are. For free. In its own sitemap, its own page counts and its own listings.

You just have to count.

This is how I do it for Japan Ramen Guide and Japan Lookout, with the real numbers.

1. Count their pages

1.1 Start with the sitemap

Most sites list every page they want Google to find in a file at /sitemap.xml. It's public.

In October I pulled apart the sitemap of goshuin.com, a site and app for collecting temple and shrine stamps in Japan. I like what they've built, and the setup is close to what I want for ramen.

Their count on Oct 20, 2026: 37,260 URLs. That's 4,140 pages in each of 9 languages.

Japan Ramen Guide at the time: 11,393 URLs across 10 languages.

Three times bigger. That sounds bad. Until you split it up.

1.2 Count page types, not pages

Here's what those 4,140 pages per language actually are (English):

Now it's not a number. It's a plan.

Most of their site is generated from data: places, stations, cities, months, terms. Each new temple adds about 4 to 5 pages in every language.

Some of those pages are thin. A station page was about 273 words. A month page about 303.

And three of those page types I didn't have at all: station pages, month pages and one page per glossary term. I had one glossary page for everything.

2. Check the numbers behind the numbers

2.1 "Big" can be smaller than it looks

Their domain rating was 33. Mine was 1.

That gap looked huge. So I checked how old their domain was.

Registered in 2012. Archived copies going back to 2011. From 2013 to 2019 it mostly redirected, which looks like a parked domain.

The app itself launched in June 2025. It had 11 US ratings when I looked.

So: an old, exact-match domain with a new product on top. Smart. But not 33 points of content I somehow missed.

2.2 Where I was already ahead

• Speed. Their place page was 689 KB of HTML and took 0.18 to 0.49 seconds from my test. My shop pages: 105 KB and 0.09 to 0.29 seconds.
• Languages. 10 against their 9.
• Depth. About 1,000 words on my shop pages against about 811 on their main detail page. Queue tips, payment info, ticket machine help.

2.3 Where I was behind

• Authority, by a lot.
• An app banner and a "Get App" button on every page.
• Links that open the app straight from Google results.
• One account that works on the website and in the app.
• Photos.

Two of those are now done or ready for launch day on my side: app links are set up for shop, city and map pages, and every app link will carry a tag so I can see which pages drive installs. Something they don't do.

3. Look where they don't go

Some gaps aren't in anyone's sitemap. They're an angle nobody took.

In late October I wanted a page on Fukuoka's yatai, the open-air food stalls that set up on the pavement each evening.

First, who already covers them:

• The city's official tourism site, in English, Korean and Traditional Chinese.
• A big food tour company.
• Japan's national tourism site.
• Korean blogs.
• A Japanese site run by the city that lists every stall.

Plenty of coverage. But none of it was built around ramen, with area, hours and whether they take cards, in both English and Korean.

That was the gap. Narrow, specific, and a real question people have when they're standing in Nakasu at 11pm.

So I built it. The yatai guide now lists all 98 stalls on the city's official list, with the 76 that serve ramen or yaki ramen marked in red. In English, Korean, Japanese and Traditional Chinese.

Is it the best one out there? It's the best English one I found. It still has gaps: some hours aren't known, and some romaji is a bit odd. I'd rather say that than pretend.

4. When their numbers don't exist

Sometimes you go looking for a competitor's number and it isn't there.

One of my outreach emails said another ramen app covered "about 700 shops". Before sending, I checked its App Store page. No shop count. Just a line about bowls its users had eaten.

So the line came out.

5. The gap a sitemap won't show you

Japan Lookout came from a gap you can't count.

Things change in Japan all the time: fees, rules, closures, transport. And the notice is usually buried on an official site, in Japanese.

Big travel sites mostly write guides meant to last for years. A rule change is a small edit to them, made whenever someone gets to it.

So Lookout does one thing: tracks the changes, in plain English, each one checked against the official source. 15 alerts live by the end of October.

Two examples of the kind of thing it catches:

• Tax-free shopping in Japan became a refund system on Nov 1, 2026. You pay full price and get the tax back after a customs check when you leave.
• Seven rail and transit operators announced on Oct 13, 2026 that magnetic tickets will switch to QR codes. The date is "spring 2027", nothing more exact. I didn't invent one.

And what it skips: standing rules with no change date, changes that are years old, and timetables. Those aren't news.

6. My gap checklist

1. Open the competitor's /sitemap.xml (or robots.txt, which usually points to it). Count the URLs.
2. Group them by page type. Count each type.
3. Open a few of each type. How many words? Real content or a template with a name swapped in?
4. List the page types you don't have.
5. Check their age and authority before you panic. An old domain explains a lot.
6. Make two columns: where you're ahead, where you're behind.
7. Look for the angle everyone covers halfway. That's often your best first page.
8. Only use numbers they actually publish. Write down the date you checked.

What I used:

• The competitor's own sitemap, pages and App Store listing.
• The Wayback Machine, to see how old a domain really is and what it used to be.

Final thoughts

Every big site has gaps. They're too big to cover everything well.

You don't need to beat them everywhere. You need one page type they don't have, one angle they skipped, or one kind of news they're too slow for.

Then build that, and say where your facts came from. It's how Japan Ramen Guide got its yatai guide and how Japan Lookout got started.