AI Search
AI Briefing
5 most important AI updates after 8pm every day, curated for you.
Someone messaged us quoting Startup Fortune only gets a thousand visitors a month. So I checked Ahrefs out of curiosity. It told me we did 3,300 visits in June, a month we actually served well over a million. When a tool is off by that much, it stops being a tool.
Someone messaged a short while ago to let us know that Ahrefs shows that Startup Fortune only gets about a thousand visitors a month. So out of pure curiosity I looked us up on Ahrefs’ traffic checker tool – something I had never used and did not know existed. It told me we did 3,300 visits in June. We served well over a million that month. At some point a number that wrong stops being data.
Here is how it started. Someone dropped us a note, the friendly kind that is really a jab, saying it was cute that we publish so much for a site that only pulls a thousand visitors a month. I had no idea where that figure came from. I write here, I watch our own analytics, and a thousand a month is not a number I recognise.
So I did the thing you do. I went looking for whatever they were looking at. That is how I ended up on Ahrefs and their traffic checker at ahrefs.com/traffic-checker, a tool I did not know was a thing people quoted at each other. I typed in our domain, half expecting it to at least land in the right neighbourhood.
It said 3,300 visits for the month of June.
June was one of our biggest months. We crossed well past a million visitors. I can watch a good chunk of them arrive in real time, there is a live counter at the top of this very site, and right now it is showing a few hundred people reading along with you. So the Ahrefs estimate was not a little off. It was off by a factor of roughly three hundred.
Think about what that means for a second. This is not a tool missing a decimal. It looked at a site doing seven figures of monthly traffic and confidently reported low four figures. If I trusted that number, I would think we were a ghost town. If a competitor trusted it, they would think we were nothing worth watching. If an advertiser trusted it, they would lowball us into next year.
And that is the actual problem. Nobody treats these estimates as the wild guesses they are. People screenshot them. They pitch off them. They message site owners to tell them how small they are, based on a number a machine invented with no real access to the traffic it claims to measure.
I want to be fair here. Estimating a stranger’s traffic from the outside is hard. No external tool can actually see another site’s server logs or analytics, so everything is inference from crawl data and click models. I get that. But being hard is not an excuse for being confidently, wildly wrong and dressing it up as a real figure with a clean dashboard around it.
There is a difference between an honest estimate that says “we are not sure, this is a rough guess” and a tool that prints 3,300 next to your name as if it counted every one. The first is useful. The second is worse than nothing, because it hands people false confidence to make real decisions with.
So this is my gentle suggestion to Ahrefs, from someone who came in with zero grudges and zero history with your product. If your traffic checker can look at a site serving over a million real people and tell the world it got 3,300, maybe that tool has done its tour. Retire it with dignity. Put up a number you can actually stand behind, or put up nothing at all.
Because right now it is not a joke I am making. It is a joke your tool is making, and our traffic is the punchline.
