AI Searchwebsite SEOWebsite Traffic
Backlinko readers get
access for 14 days. 55+ tools.
Instantly see any website's estimated monthly traffic, top traffic sources, visitor engagement, and more.
Written by Backlinko Team
Knowing how much traffic your competitors get, where it comes from, and how engaged their visitors are can help you benchmark your performance. And it lets you identify new opportunities to improve your strategy.
Analyzing your own website traffic can help you understand whether your SEO efforts are working.
So you can understand if you’re driving traffic for your target keywords. Or if recent page optimizations are leading to ranking gains.
But traffic analysis really starts providing value when you analyze your coWmpetitors.
This helps you:
See how much traffic your competitors receive, and their performance over time:
If their traffic increases a lot in a short space of time, it could indicate that they’ve launched a new content marketing campaign. Or picked up lots of new backlinks.
Find out whether the visitors your competitors receive are actually engaging with their content. Compare this data with your own metrics to see where you need to improve.
For example, if your competitors seem to keep their visitors on the page for longer than you, check out their content to understand why:
Use these insights to improve your own content.
See which search terms drive the most traffic to your competitor websites to find gaps in your own keyword strategy:
You can see metrics like:
See how your backlink profile stacks up against competitors. And understand whether you might need to scale your outreach efforts.
For example, if it looks like your competitor is attracting a lot of new referring domains, they might be running a link building campaign.
To keep pace with them, you might want to ramp up your own outreach efforts to boost your site’s authority.
Once you’ve gathered competitor traffic data, you need to turn these insights into actionable strategies.
Here’s how:
If your competitor’s organic traffic surges, analyze their recent content and keyword targeting. Are they targeting a new topic that you’ve missed?
Also pay attention to their top ranking keywords. If they’re driving a significant portion of their traffic, or they’ve recently gained positions, check their content.
Have they made major website improvements?
Are these topics you could also target and steal some of their traffic?
Identify your competitor’s most-visited pages and analyze their content structure.
Are these pages you could create better versions of?
If so, start creating quality content on those topics and monitor your rankings over time.
Engagement metrics can have a BIG impact on your business’s bottom line. You can use our traffic checker to understand how you stack up against your competitors for key engagement metrics.
For example, if your competitors’ visitors tend to stay longer, examine their content depth and format. Is it easier to follow than yours? Does it have more engaging images?
And if your competitors’ visitors are viewing more pages per visit, it could suggest they have a stronger internal linking structure than you.
Finally, if you have a high bounce rate compared to competitors, look for opportunities to create better-optimized content that gives users what they want.
While our traffic checker is straightforward to use, there are some cases where you could run into issues.
Here’s how to solve the most common problems:
This is likely the most common issue you’ll run into.
To fix it:
As with any SEO tool, you’ll likely see differences in the data when you compare our traffic checker to another one. This happens because different tools use their own ways to collect and display the data and insights they find.
Do the following to ensure you interpret the data correctly:
If the issue isn’t with the tool, and instead is with the website’s traffic itself, there could be a number of causes.
To find the reason:
Our traffic checker is powered by Semrush, which collects anonymized clickstream data from diverse panels, along with real-time search engine results. Proprietary machine learning algorithms then process this data to provide accurate traffic estimates.
All of Semrush’s tools use a similar, rigorous process to help you develop a winning digital marketing strategy based on real data.
Try Semrush out for free today.
Backlinko turns AI SEO into clear, actionable strategies with step-by-step frameworks and examples to help you rank in an AI-driven search world. Think less guessing, more visibility.
© 2025 Backlinko is a Trademark of Semrush Inc
