TNG Score Explained: Why My Tool Gave a 'Wide Open' Keyword a 3/10

The Keyword That Looked Like Free Money

Last week a weird little game blew up on Taiwanese social media: someone reportedly spent NT$300,000 on AI tools to build a GTA-style game set in Taipei. People were searching "Taipei GTA" and getting a mess of results back.

I ran it through my own tool. The report came back with four content gaps. Only 2 of the top 10 results actually answered what people wanted to know. Two of them were Fandom wiki pages about "Taipan" and "Taiwan" that had nothing to do with the game. The #1 result had an empty snippet.

A year ago I would have opened a doc and started writing within five minutes. Instead, the top of the report said this:

TNG Opportunity: 3.0 / 10 💀

My first reaction was that the scoring was broken. It wasn't, but it took me a while to see why. That's the reason I rebuilt the scoring, and it's the best way I know to explain how it works.

Why I Got Rid of the Single Score

The first version of TheNicheGap gave one number per keyword, basically a home-made keyword difficulty score. It had two problems I kept running into on my own sites.

• It mixed up two questions. "Can I rank for this?" and "Will ranking actually bring visitors?" are different questions. A keyword can be easy to rank for and still bring almost no clicks because an AI Overview answers it at the top of the page. One number can't tell those apart.
• It multiplied itself to zero. I calculated it as weakness × gap × intent × and so on. If one factor was low, the whole score crashed, even when the other signals were strong. I was skipping keywords that turned out to be fine.

So on October 2nd I replaced it with three separate readings. I call it the TNG Trifecta, because I couldn't come up with a less dramatic name.

The Three Numbers (and What Each One Answers)

Opportunity is now calculated as roughly Min(Base + Gaps, Blocker Cap) × Confidence. The gaps add to the score instead of multiplying, so one weak signal no longer wipes out everything else.

The important part is the Blocker Cap. If the top 10 is mostly brand homepages, or mostly product pages for a question people are trying to learn about, Opportunity can't go above about 3, however many gaps the analysis finds. I added this after several articles I wrote into SERPs full of brand pages stalled on page two for months. A gap doesn't matter if Google has already decided this search is about brands.

There's a fourth metric on the roadmap, Site Fit, which will check how well a keyword matches your domain. It isn't live yet.

Back to Taipei GTA: Reading a 3.0 Properly

This is the full set of numbers from that report:

• Opportunity: 3.0 / 10
• Click Potential: 6.5 / 10
• Confidence: 82%
• Avg Top 10 DR: 46
• Intent: Informational (88% confidence)

The 3.0 is exactly the cap value, so the Blocker Cap was the deciding factor. The evidence list explains why: 3 of the 10 results are brand homepages (gta.com.tw, gtaboom.com, gtaweb.eu). Google is still unsure whether "Taipei GTA" means the new viral game or a GTA-themed brand, so it shows a bit of both.

I'll be honest: I argued with my own tool here. Three brand pages out of ten isn't "dominated". If I had tuned the cap myself, I'd have let this one score a 4 or a 5. I've already noted this as a calibration issue.

Still, a quick look at the score would have missed the most useful part of the report. Click Potential is 6.5. There's no Shopping carousel and nothing in the SERP is answering the question for the searcher. If you do rank, people will click. The #1 result is the game itself, a DR 56 Vercel app with no description. The only result that actually explains the story is a Marie Claire Taiwan article, and it's thin.

If you want to check this yourself, here's the full Taipei GTA report with the evidence list, all four gaps, and the outline it generated: thenichegap.com/report/taipei-gta-2026-10-02-1efa1968.

What I'd Actually Do With This Keyword

Low Opportunity, decent Click Potential, high Confidence, and a trending topic: to me that means a quick-win article, not a long-term pillar page.

• Write one focused guide in Traditional Chinese, because that's who is searching. Cover what the game is, how to play it, and the NT$300,000 origin story. Two of the four gaps are exactly those topics.
• Publish it this week, not next month. Trending searches drop off fast.
• Don't build a cluster of 15 articles around it. The cap is warning that once the hype fades, Google could easily hand this SERP back to the brand pages.

The old single score would have given me either a "go" or a "skip". The three numbers told me something more useful: worth doing, but quickly and in a small way.

A Cheat Sheet for Reading Your Own TNG Report

• High Opportunity + High Click Potential: Write it properly and make it a pillar page. This combination is rare, so take it seriously when you see it.
• High Opportunity + Low Click Potential: You'll rank and the AI Overview will take most of the clicks. Only worth it if being cited by AI tools matters to you more than visits.
• Low Opportunity (capped) + High Click Potential: Same situation as Taipei GTA. Read the evidence before you decide. Sometimes it's a fast trending play; sometimes the big brands really do own the SERP.
• Low everything: Skip it. Don't try to talk yourself into it.
• Confidence under 60%: Treat every number above as a rough guess. The SERP is probably in flux; run it again in a week.

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