How to Check a Competitor’s Website Traffic: 5 Tools and Free Methods

Only the site owner knows a website’s exact traffic: it’s in their Google Analytics and Search Console. Every external service gives you an estimate. But for comparing yourself with competitors, that’s usually enough: you can see which of you is bigger, where a competitor gets traffic from, which queries people find them by, and how that changes over time.

Below: how these services work and how far you can trust them, 5 tools with current prices (checked on 27 September 2026), free methods, and what to do with the data.

How services estimate someone else’s traffic

Understanding the principle matters, because it determines what you can trust and what you can’t. Services estimate traffic in two ways.

Estimates based on search rankings. Serpstat, Ahrefs and Semrush regularly check Google results for millions of queries. They know where a site ranks for each query, how often that query is searched and roughly how many clicks each position gets. Multiplying these gives an estimate of search traffic. Hence the limitations:

• only search traffic is counted, without ads, social media, email or direct visits;
• queries missing from the service’s database aren’t counted, and databases are smaller for some languages and countries than for English and the US;
• clicks per position actually depend on what else is on the results page: ads, maps, AI answers.

Estimates based on panel data. Similarweb collects anonymous data on the behaviour of a sample of internet users and extrapolates it to everyone. That shows all traffic, not just search: direct visits, social media, ads, referrals from other sites. But the smaller the site, the less panel data there is and the rougher the estimate. For small sites, Similarweb often shows no figures at all.

How accurate is this data?

Absolute numbers can differ from reality several times over, in either direction. But comparisons and trends are usually right: if a service shows that a competitor is twice your size and their traffic has grown over six months, that’s most likely true.

A simple way to gauge the error for your niche: enter your own site into the service and compare it with your data in Google Analytics and Search Console. If the service underestimates your traffic by a factor of three, it’s reasonable to assume it underestimates competitors in the same niche by about as much. Compare data from two or three services instead of trusting a single number.

5 tools for checking competitor traffic

Similarweb: all traffic and its sources

Enter a domain on similarweb.com and, without registering, you’ll see estimated visits over recent months, the share of traffic from search, social media, ads and direct visits, the main countries and similar sites. It’s the best way to understand where a competitor gets customers: if half their traffic comes from social media and yours is zero, that matters more than any keywords.

More detailed data (by page, query or referring site) is in the paid plans; Similarweb prices them individually or after a trial. Data may be missing for small sites.

Serpstat: search traffic and queries

Serpstat is an SEO platform founded in Ukraine, with query databases for Google in many countries. For a competitor’s site it shows estimated search traffic, the queries it ranks for, its most popular pages, visibility trends and its Google ads.

The most useful report for comparison is the competitor analysis with keyword overlap: it shows the queries where a competitor ranks and you don’t. The Individual plan costs $50 a month billed annually, with a 7-day free trial.

Ahrefs: search traffic and backlinks

Ahrefs’ free Traffic Checker shows estimated search traffic for any site, along with its top pages and queries. For detailed analysis there are paid plans: Starter at $29 a month for basic competitor research, and full plans from $129 a month.

Ahrefs’ strength is its backlink database: you can see which sites link to a competitor, which suggests where to look for links for yourself. For your own site there’s the free Ahrefs Webmaster Tools: once you verify ownership, you get an audit and link data.

Semrush: search and ads

Semrush is similar to Ahrefs and Serpstat: estimated search traffic, queries, pages, backlinks. It’s especially useful for analysing Google Ads: you can see a competitor’s ads, the queries they advertise on and for how long.

A free account gives you 10 reports a day, enough to look at a few competitors. The paid SEO toolkit starts at $139 a month billed monthly, less when billed annually.

Google Trends: free brand comparison

Google Trends doesn’t show site traffic, but it does show how search interest in a brand name changes. Enter your name and the names of two or three competitors, choose your country and a 12-month period, and you’ll see which of you is better known and how that’s changing. For brands with few searches the chart will be empty, and then this method doesn’t work.

4 more free ways to look at a competitor

1. Meta Ad Library. In the Ad Library you can see all of a competitor’s active ads on Facebook and Instagram: copy, creatives, and the date they started running. An ad that has been running for months is most likely paying off.
2. Google Ads Transparency Center. The Ads Transparency Center shows a competitor’s ads in Search, on YouTube and in Google’s display network.
3. Searching Google by hand. Enter the 10–20 main queries in your niche and note who ranks at the top. It’s the most accurate way to see who you really compete with in search, and it’s often not the companies you consider your competitors.
4. The competitor’s website itself. Its structure, which services have their own pages, whether there’s a blog and what it covers, the prices and how the enquiry process works. It’s free and often more useful than any traffic figures.

Competitor analysis in 30 minutes: step by step

1. Make a list of competitors. Search Google for 5–10 main queries in your niche, with your city if you work locally, and write down the sites that keep appearing in the top 10. Add 1–2 companies you actually compete with for customers.
2. Compare the overall picture. Enter each domain in Similarweb: estimated visits and the share of search, social media, ads and direct visits. Put them in a table next to your own site.
3. Look at search. In Serpstat, Ahrefs or Semrush, open each competitor’s top pages by traffic and top queries. Mark the pages you have no equivalent for.
4. Find the gaps. Run a keyword comparison of your site against 2–3 competitors. Filter for queries where competitors are in the top 10 and you aren’t, and pick the ones that match your services.
5. Check the ads. Open Meta’s Ad Library and Google’s Ads Transparency Center and note which offers competitors have been advertising longest.
6. Define 3–5 actions. For example: create separate pages for two services that bring competitors traffic; write an article on a topic where only competitors rank; test an offer a competitor has been advertising for six months.

Repeat this analysis once a quarter: that way you see not just a snapshot, but where competitors are heading.

Common mistakes in competitor analysis

• Comparing absolute numbers from different services. Similarweb and Ahrefs measure different things: all traffic versus search only. Compare sites within one service.
• Treating traffic as success. Lots of traffic to informational articles doesn’t mean a competitor gets customers from it. Look at which pages bring the visitors.
• Analysing the wrong competitors. Large marketplaces and aggregators in the results aren’t your direct competitors and are hard to compare with. Look for companies your size.
• Collecting data and doing nothing. A 40-page report without a list of actions is wasted time. Three concrete conclusions beat a hundred-row table.

What to do with the data

A competitor’s traffic figure changes nothing on its own. The useful conclusions you can draw from it:

• Traffic sources. If a competitor gets most of their traffic from search and you get yours only from ads, it’s worth investing in SEO. If they’re strong on social media, look at what exactly they do there.
• The pages that bring traffic. Often it’s not the home page but pages for specific services, locations or articles. If you don’t have such pages, that’s a ready-made work plan.
• Queries where a competitor ranks and you don’t. The keyword gap report in Serpstat, Ahrefs or Semrush gives you a ready list of topics for new pages and articles.
• Seasonality. A year of competitors’ traffic trends shows when demand in your niche peaks and when to launch ads.
• Ads. Ads a competitor runs for a long time hint at which offers and wording work in your niche.

Don’t copy your competitor: they can be wrong too, and what works for them won’t necessarily work for you. Use the data to find gaps: queries, pages and channels where a competitor is strong and you’re absent.

How to know your own traffic exactly

For your own site you don’t need estimates; there’s exact data:

• Google Search Console: your site’s impressions, clicks and rankings on Google for every query and page;
• Google Analytics 4: all visits from all sources, on-site behaviour, and enquiries and sales if events are set up.

If your site doesn’t have these, set them up first: without them, comparing yourself with competitors will be incomplete. And if you have traffic but few enquiries, the problem is often not the number of visitors but the site itself; see our articles on the website UX audit and website development mistakes. How search is changing with AI answers and what that means for traffic is covered in our article on AI Overviews and GEO.