The product covers far more of what the customer is looking for than a named alternative: more titles, homes, places, prices or people, so a search finds the answer. Customers cited the breadth when they chose or came back. The breadth must be in what the customer searches, not in the number of features (Depth) or of job steps (End-to-End Workflow).
How Coverage works
A customer who usually finds what they want in one place stops checking elsewhere. Wider coverage brings more searches, and more searches justify adding still more coverage. A rival with a narrower catalog sends customers off to look again.
How companies won with Coverage
From the win chains in Strategy Canon case studies: what the winner did, and what its rival did at the same step.
vs. MyHeritage · 1997–2009
Ancestry.com
Digitized archive records, searchable from home by subscription
What it did
Subscriptions from about 1997; every National Archives census microfilm scanned for a paid census add-on in October 2000
MyHeritage
MyHeritage went live in 2005 as a family-tree site and added historical records only in 2012
A correspondent network that reported on distant merchants once and sold each report to every subscriber
What it did
Tappan's Mercantile Agency (New York, July 1841) used attorneys, bank cashiers and merchants as local correspondents: 133 subscribers by August 1841
The Bradstreet Company
John M. Bradstreet started in Cincinnati in 1849 from a file of credit information gathered while liquidating an estate, and moved to New York in 1855 to compete with the Mercantile Agency directly
Payroll partners carried the database from large employers to millions of small ones
What it did
Contributors rose from 1,500+ TALX clients, mostly large employers (2006), to Equifax's count of organizations supplying payroll data, including small employers via payroll providers: 10,600+ (2017), 2M+ (2022) and 4M+ (2025)
Truework
Truework partnered with Gusto, Zenefits and BambooHR and counted over 35 million US employee records in 2022
What did the product cover that a named alternative did not, by how much, and did customers cite the breadth when they chose or came back?
Who names it
Author
What they call it / where it appears
Bezos / Collins +
Selection: one input to the Amazon flywheel
Thompson
Aggregators win by gathering all of the supply in front of users
Note. Needs a comparison with a named alternative. Watch for double-counting: many coverage steps are also tagged Aggregator Strategy or User-Generated Content, which explain how the breadth was gathered. Coverage is the breadth itself, as the customer meets it. Counterexample: OneLogin listed more app integrations than Okta and lost.