How I Use SparkToro's MCP to Find Content Gaps

Today I want to talk to you about SparkToro's MCP. They just released this, and I think it's super powerful. Now you can use audience research as context when you're working with your favorite LLM tool. Mine is Claude Code, so that's what I'm going to be talking about today.

But before we get into how to hook up the SparkToro MCP and my own use case, let's zoom out for a second.

Zoom out before you go nose to the glass

Let me catch you up on a conversation I was having with one of my large university clients. They were asking me about AI strategy, and they said Adobe has approached them about this content tool where you can tweak your content and optimize it for AI search platforms.

I think that's just fine to do, but it's a little bit nose to the glass when it comes to strategy. I prefer to zoom out and think bigger picture first.

And that's exactly the SparkToro workflow I'm going to show you today.

The three-MCP workflow

So here's what I did, stacking three MCPs together in Claude Code:

1. Screaming Frog MCP. I used the Screaming Frog MCP with Claude Code to crawl a specific segment of their site and isolate it to just the blogs, because I wanted to know what kind of coverage they had currently.
2. Otter AI MCP. Then I used the Otter AI MCP to add current priorities as context. Otter is an AI transcription tool, and I had this year's kickoff call saved in there. So I referenced that and brought it in as context just to be sure the output I was getting was going to be aligned with client priorities.
3. SparkToro MCP. With those two things done, I used the SparkToro MCP to find audience research keywords, AI prompt topics, and even social platform data, to tell me where on the web their audience was asking questions, doing discovery, et cetera.

Hooking up the SparkToro MCP

Before I show you that output, I want to show you how I found the SparkToro MCP documentation that tells you how to hook this up. I literally just Googled sparktoro.com MCP. It brings you to their official announcement, where you can connect your audience research directly to your favorite AI tool. There's even a use case in there, so I'd recommend reading it. But it links to the official documentation, which you can then open up.

And then here's your getting started steps. Grab that, and then just go into Claude and show it to Claude. Just copy everything on the page and tell Claude you want to hook into the SparkToro MCP. It's really that easy.

It's probably going to open up a tab if you haven't signed in, and you'll just go ahead and sign in. You'll authenticate, and then you are good to go.

What the coverage analysis revealed

I did those three things, a Screaming Frog crawl, I tapped into Otter for priorities, and then I used the SparkToro MCP. I just gave it my client's URL. I asked it to create an audience for this client, and then I told it I want to marry this audience research data with their current blog content coverage, and I want to spot the gaps. To create the page, I also used Claude's front-end design skill.

First of all, it spotted 42 blog posts and three program hubs that were covered. We've got five essential gaps, and then it gave me the total pages crawled, which is not too useful.

And look at the coverage plot. This is the really cool visual here. Here's where we're over-served, and you can hover over these and see we've got tons of faculty spotlights, and some soft skills and how to balance workload and things like that. Here's where we have our strengths, and I can hover over it and see where we're good there.

But then we've got our priority gaps, and this is really the useful stuff. Rankings, best business schools, that's pretty typical. People are looking for that kind of thing, and that showed up in SparkToro's AI prompt topics data. We know from query fan-outs, if you've seen them at all and studied what AI searches for based on what you prompt, it very often puts "best" in front of a query to put together an output. So that's not surprising.

But a lot of this stuff is really useful. We've got people asking about cost, tuition, scholarships, and it's a gap. We don't really have much content for that, so we're probably losing some prospects based on that.

Where the audience actually spends time

Then it tells us a little bit about the SparkToro data that went into this. You can see these are AI prompt topics. The top one with the highest affinity in SparkToro, which just means your audience is most interested in it, is best business schools rankings for this particular university client. We've got a ton of other great topics here, and it'll tell you if it's a gap, covered, or partially covered.

Now it's also got some SparkToro data on social platforms where this audience spends their time. They spend most of their time on YouTube, really critical. Then we've got Facebook and Instagram, got some Reddit, and then LinkedIn. Now there's one breakdown I want to zoom in on. Listen to how insightful this is, and this shows you what AI can do when it has the right context:

• YouTube isn't just number one. The specific channels this audience watches are MBA and grad admissions creators. They go to video to research programs, which is the strongest case for putting program content on YouTube.
• Facebook and Instagram score high, but for almost every audience. So there are no specifics there, and that's why it's going to recommend we go for paid amplification, not organic priorities.
• LinkedIn over-indexes for a career pivot crowd. That kind of tells you a little bit about what some of those short-form posts could look like.
• Reddit is where they ask questions, so engage in the threads. That one's a no-brainer, but the stuff before it is really good.

From a gap to a specific repurpose plan

Then I wanted it to give me some specifics. We have gaps, and you're giving me topic areas, but what's an example of a specific post we could create to cover that gap? So you'll see under cost, tuition, and financing, we've got "how much does an online MBA cost and how to pay for it." Then we've got comparisons beyond just online and full-time, so MBA versus MSBA: which master's fits your career?

Another section of this output I really liked was the way it advised me across platforms:

1. Start on YouTube. We're going to talk about a program, what an online MBA really costs. Start with the video, because that video could then become a blog post. You just take the transcript and you repurpose it. That's a really powerful move for AI search strategy.
2. Move to the blog. Now we're on the blog, and we're saying "how much does an online MBA cost and how to pay for it." That's our topic there.
3. Go short-form on LinkedIn. We go from long-form to short-form text, and we're going to have a series about the sticker price of an MBA isn't what you actually pay. I would probably break that up into about three to five different posts.

And that's a really nice repurpose workflow based on a gap.

Give this workflow a try

That is the SparkToro MCP, and it's super easy to hook up. I would suggest giving this sort of topic coverage workflow a try. It's going to reveal some really interesting gaps that you can fill with some non-commodity content, as Google calls it, and perform better in AI search.