Which Tool Has the Most Accurate Website Traffic Checker?

I’m deeply involved with SEO, content marketing, and data analytics these days, and that means I’m constantly using platforms like Ahrefs to gather data and run comparative analysis on my blogs, my clients’ blogs, and our competitors.

I’m constantly confronted with a question: how accurate is the data these sites provide? As you likely well know, the numbers they provide tend to be fairly different, not just from one another, but from the data in your own on-site analytics.

I’ve talked about this in a past with Semrush and Ahrefs, two of the largest SEO platforms for estimating traffic:

• How Accurate is Semrush Traffic Estimates?
• Ahrefs Scraping: Data Accuracy and More

But this begs the question: which tool is the most accurate for website traffic?

I wanted to address this question today, but also discuss why it might not matter as much as you think.

Which Tool Has the Most Accurate Traffic Estimates?

Let’s start with the question most of you want a simple answer to: which tools offer the most accurate traffic estimates?

In my view, there are three answers to this question.

First is Semrush. Semrush is one of the largest harvesters of SEO data and analytics information out there, and as you’ll learn in the next section, the more data they have, the better their estimates can be. I cautiously rank Semrush as #2 in terms of competitive traffic analysis. You can get more accurate data about your own site, but there are very few sources that offer more accurate data for other sites you don’t own.

As of the last time I checked, Semrush has something like 25.3 billion keywords of data scraped and analyzed, which is an immense amount. It’s still a drop in the bucket compared to what Google indexes, but it’s one of the largest independent data sets out there.

The second is Ahrefs. Ahrefs has long been my pick for the top SEO and data-gathering platform out there. It does so much, provides so much data, and is just about the most accurate I’ve found. Even then, they readily acknowledge that their data can have issues, and while they have the largest data harvesting network this side of Google, there’s only so much they can gather.

Ahrefs has slightly more tracked keywords than Semrush, with 28.7 billion last I saw in their published statistics. Three billion more keywords than Semrush is a lot, even if statistically speaking a lot of those keywords have very little traffic associated with them.

The third is Topicfinder. While Topicfinder isn’t designed as a traffic comparison tool, I pull information from both Ahrefs and Semrush, as well as other sources of data, and synthesize it all into one readout that provides a more comprehensive picture of a site’s traffic.

There are also a handful of other “fourth-party” tools similar to Topicfinder’s data out there. The idea being that any platform using data from multiple third-party sources and synthesizing it into an ostensibly more accurate whole is potentially better than using Ahrefs/Semrush directly. I don’t have particular recommendations for alternatives, though; I usually just use Ahrefs, Semrush, and my own platform.

If you had to pick one single tool to use, I would of course recommend Topicfinder. If you had to pick one single SEO data analytics platform to use, Ahrefs would be my go-to.

For those of you who wanted a simple answer, there you go. For the rest of you who want to learn more about how all of this works and why there’s inaccuracy in traffic data, keep on reading.

Why Traffic Estimates Are So Different Between Tools

This is where I wanted to dig into the theory and practice behind traffic estimates, and why these tools have such different estimates, as well as why we’re likely never going to see a fully accurate traffic estimation tool.

It’s easy to just say “well, it’s an estimate” and handwave it away, but there’s some key limitations to the way the internet works that get in the way.

How traffic estimation tools work.

Traffic estimation tools get their data from a variety of different sources.

One is direct data. Google Analytics gets very accurate traffic data about your site because you install it on your site, so it can harvest that information directly. However, this slightly falls apart when you get to attributes of that traffic because, after a certain point, Google starts to use sampling, which necessarily adds inaccuracies to the data in exchange for reduced computational load on Google’s part.

If you have a plugin on your site for Ahrefs, Semrush, or another of these tools, there’s a chance they might be harvesting traffic information to send to home base. You generally have to give consent for this to happen, but it’s easy to have forgotten whether or not you clicked yes when you installed the plugin.

You can also more directly agree to feed data into their database. For example, if you want more accurate information about your own website in Ahrefs, you can link your Google Analytics and Google Search Console data to Ahrefs directly. This gives them the ability to read and make use of your Google data.

Since the majority of websites don’t do this, the rest of the data for these tools has to come from somewhere else.

A very basic, dumbed-down explanation is something like this.

First, you pick a keyword. You figure out how much traffic that keyword gets in total. If, for example, you want to use “content marketing” as a keyword, you could estimate that it gets around 22,200 searches per day in the US (according to WordStream’s tool).

Then, you use the statistical distribution of traffic across rankings. Backlinko did a big study and found that the #1 search result in Google gets 27.6% of the clicks through.

Then you have to do some math. You have to figure how much of the search volume for the query results in clicks, and you have to then take 27.6% of that number, which gives you a traffic data number for the site in the #1 search result for that keyword in that country.

If you’re reading this and you’re thinking, “There are at least three different places where there’s a significant margin of error here,” you’re right. That’s part of the problem with traffic estimators.

I’m vastly simplifying this, of course. But, the core concept is pretty accurate: you start with a known estimate of how much traffic a keyword gets, you figure out what share of that traffic goes to each site ranking in the search results for that keyword, and then you repeat that process for every keyword and every website you can. With Ahrefs, that’s 27-some-odd billion keywords, with 10/20/30/however many pages back they go in the search results for each of them.

And, yes, there’s a lot of wobbliness in the data. Some queries get a different distribution of traffic across different sites in the rankings. Google’s AI summaries, their Image Packs and Video Packs and Knowledge Graphs and all the rest siphon traffic away, and it all gets muddy.

This is where the first-party data comes into play. Since Ahrefs and the other big tools can get some data directly from Google Analytics and other first-hand sources – and they might even be able to buy data from companies like Google directly – they can then use that data.

Critically, they don’t just slot that data in so that sites offering data get more accurate information. They feed it into their machine learning algorithms and use it to validate and verify data, as well as refine the estimates across keywords, industries, and trends.

Finally, keep in mind that all of this is a snapshot in time. Ahrefs can’t check a keyword once and call it good because trends, changes in industries, changes in content, changes in sites in the rankings, algorithm updates, and a million other factors can change that information. Anything they don’t check for more than a week or two can grow surprisingly far out of date. So, when Ahrefs adds a new keyword to their database, they aren’t adding a single snapshot of that data; they’re adding it to an ongoing tracking for that keyword.

The technological limitations on traffic estimation.

This is where we start to run into the fact that there’s only so much computing power and data storage space in the world.

Yes, companies like Ahrefs and Semrush have absolutely immense data centers with incredible amounts of processing power and storage capacity to keep it all going.

Google has orders of magnitude more, and the internet as a whole is even greater. It might feel like different subsets of infinity, but there are limitations. Part of why Google makes changes to sample data instead of harvesting it all, or use estimations, or cuts features with low usage, is because even small optimizations can save immense amounts of power, space, and computation cycles.

This is actually one area where modern developments in machine learning – not the generative AI people think of when you say AI, but more AI-like ML – can help a lot. These algorithms can be trained in complex ways to analyze data and produce more accurate estimates than previous techniques. Even still, there are limits that are inevitably reached.

On top of all of that, there will always be keywords that aren’t tracked, simply because there are too many possible keywords for the sum total of human computing capacity to track them all.

Why there can never be a fully accurate traffic tool.

There’s only one way you could ever have fully accurate traffic data, and that’s if every site harvested traffic data and fed that data into one central database it could use.

You could say, “couldn’t Google just provide that data?” And, maybe they could, for themselves. But, while Google has command of a lot of traffic, think of all of the sources of traffic on your site that don’t come from Google. Links from social media, direct traffic, app traffic, and traffic from other search engines are all not traceable by Google directly.

Google does get that traffic information if you have Google Analytics installed, but not every site uses Google Analytics. Some use other forms of analytics software, and some don’t use any.

No, you would need to either have every single website mandatorily opt-in, or you would need every single web host to agree to provide data for traffic through their servers, and have one central authority that could process it all, which is both socially, politically, and technologically infeasible.

The best we get is increasingly sophisticated machine learning and increasingly large data sets from companies like Semrush and Ahrefs to get as accurate estimations as possible.

How to Effectively Use Traffic Estimation Tools

It’s one thing to say that you can never have fully accurate traffic estimates, but it’s another to disregard them entirely. I find that the traffic information in tools like Ahrefs and Semrush is still good enough, if you use it right. That’s why I use them in Topicfinder; if I didn’t find it valuable, I wouldn’t include them.

The key is that you have to compare apples to apples. If you look up traffic data using Ahrefs for your competitors, you have to compare it to your own data as estimated by Ahrefs rather than any other source.

On top of that, you have to keep in mind that there can be a lot of variance across industries. I see this a lot, since I have clients in as varied industries as performance auto parts, restaurants, pet care, medical supplements, and travel.

So, for example, a site in a very popular niche like weight loss showing as 1,000/month traffic is probably going to have more than that when you examine it directly. Conversely, a site about freshwater aquariums, a much narrower niche, showing as 1,000/month is probably closer to that number, or even less.

The more popular a niche is, the more keywords a tool like Ahrefs is monitoring, so the more accurate the data can be.

So, if you want to get the most out of these tools, you need to look up your own estimates, compare them to your own real traffic, and then figure out what kind of variance you’re looking at. You can then apply that to get a better idea of the “real” traffic of your competitors. Or, simply use the estimates as-is as a comparative metric. Both are good options.

Finally, it’s worth keeping in mind that while traffic is important, it’s not the most important. Other metrics, like click-through rates and conversion rates, can set a lower-traffic site in a better position than a higher-traffic site, so it’s always worth paying attention to optimizations as well as growth.

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