15 Unique Ways to Check Competitor Website Traffic

You only need three tools to get sixteen highly actionable data points on your competitors’ traffic.

Before we dive in, let’s set the right expectations: no tool will give you your competitor’s exact traffic data. However, it’s still well enough to see what works for them, copy their best ideas, or set realistic benchmarks.

We’ll cover:

- Types of data you can access, such as traffic volume, trends, organic and paid keywords, and audience insights.

- Practical use cases, including benchmarking, tracking progress, identifying content gaps, boosting your SEO and SEM, and negotiating budgets.

- Last but not least, how this data is gathered and its reliability.

- Open Ahrefs’ Site Explorer and enter your domain.

- Go to the Organic competitors report.

- Open Site Explorer and enter your competitor’s domain.

- Go to the Site structure report.

- Go to Site Explorer and enter your competitor’s domain.

- Go to the Top pages report.

- Top-performing keywords and “steal” some of their traffic with your own content.

- Top-performing keywords in specific countries.

- Keywords with specific terms to find content ideas around certain topics or phrases.

- Low-difficulty keywords (typically, faster to rank).

- Go to Site Explorer and enter your competitor’s domain.

- Go to the Organic keywords report.

- Use the filters to find what you need. For instance, use the KD filter to find low-competition keywords.

- Go to Ahrefs’ Competitive Analysis tool.

- Enter your domain in the Target section.

- Enter your competitors’ domains in the Competitors section.

- Hit “Compare”.

- Click the Content Gap report.

Toggle Main positions to exclude your competitors’ rankings in SERP features like “Top stories” and “Image packs.”

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Now look through the report and identify keywords that are relevant for your site. The volume column will show you which keywords are likely to send the most traffic.

7. Analyze short- and long-term traffic performance

Short-term organic traffic performance can inform you of the latest developments in your competitors’ rankings (say, within the last 24 hours to a couple of weeks).

For example, you can observe the impact of the latest Google Update on their site, see how much traffic they gained or lost last month, or check if any of their newly launched pages are already picking up traffic.

To see short-term organic traffic performance:

- Go to Site Explorer and enter your competitor’s domain.

- In the Overview report, choose a timeframe in the Changes mode.

- Go to Site Explorer and enter your competitor’s domain.

- Turn on the Years mode in the traffic graph.

- Adjust the time frame and export the data if needed.

- Go to Site Explorer and enter your domain.

- Add competitors using the Competitors tab.

9. Compare organic share of voice

Organic share of voice (SOV) is an SEO metric that shows how much traffic goes to your pages compared to competitors’.

In other words, if you want to see your overall organic search traffic share in the market, and eventually increase it, this is the metric you’d want to use.

SOV is based on tracked keywords, so you first need to add them to the tool. These can be keywords you target on your blog, your product pages, or even all of your important keywords together.

- Go to Ahrefs’ Rank Tracker.

- Start a New project.

- Select keywords to track. You can use the filters to refine the list suggested by the tool and add some keywords later on. Make sure to choose only important locations for your site.

- Add competitors. You can add specific sites or choose from the ones suggested by the tool. Notice the keyword intersect — the higher the number, the “closer” the competitor.

- Go to Site Explorer and enter your competitor’s domain.

- Open Backlinks report. Pages with the most traffic will be displayed on top by default.

- Benchmark your site traffic trend to your competitors as a market segment.

- Identify broader industry trends and seasonal patterns in traffic.

- Assess the collective impact of major events, such as changes in search engine algorithms or economic shifts.

- Monitor the overall health and growth rate of your industry.

- Dashboard and click Create > Portfolio.

- Fill in the URLs you want to track. Note the URL mode selector. Use “Domain” to track the entire domain with subdomains, “Path” for folders, and “Exact URL” for single pages.

- Go to Site Explorer and enter your competitor’s domain.

- Open Paid keywords report.

- Go to Site Explorer.

- Enter your competitor’s domain.

- Open Paid pages report.

- Set the preferred location to see the budget per country (leave it set to all locations to see the total ad spend).

- Set the Performance report to Paid traffic cost set and adjust the timeframe.

- Social networks: scroll down a bit and see which social network the brand uses the most. This not only tells which social networks likely send the most traffic but also which proved to be the most engaging.

- Demographics tab: see data like gender, age, geography and interests. What’s unique about this data is that it comes from social media profiles.

- Social accounts tab: to see what social media accounts site visitors are likely to follow and engage with. This is a great source of potential influencers to work with.

- YouTube channels, Reddit, and Podcast tabs: see where it’s highly likely to meet your competitors’ (and possibly yours) audience.

- Web crawlers. Also known as spiders or bots. They are automated programs that browse the internet to gather information. For example, Ahrefs’ crawler is called AhrefsBot, one of the most active ones around.

- Clickstream data. Clickstream data refers to the recording of a user’s online activity as they navigate through websites. This data is anonymized and aggregated.

- Google Keyword Planner and Search Console. These tools provide valuable data on search engine performance and keyword usage. Also, this data is anonymized and aggregated.

- Social media APIs. Some social media platforms allow third-party tools to access their data.

This means that, in most cases, the data is estimated instead of actual data taken from your competitors and handed over to you.

So, when it comes to the data’s accuracy, you should expect a blend of estimated accuracy and directional accuracy. Despite best efforts, the data will be approximated and designed to give you an idea of relative performance because there’s no other way.

This also means that if you’re interested in a particular type of traffic, say traffic from search engines, it’s probably best to get a dedicated tool for that. You’ll get access to bigger data sets and more capable functionality, allowing you to do more.