7 Best Tools to Check Website Traffic (Yours & Your Competitors’)
Sometimes, it’s good to know how many visitors a website gets, for example, your enemies, oh, I mean competitors. You want to know how to check website traffic of any site out there, including yours.
Measuring website traffic, whether it’s for your own website or competitors, is something that every webmaster and marketer should do.
Why should you check website traffic?
Well, for starters, it’s a good idea to know how your website and business are growing.
This helps you identify problems or opportunities to increase the number of visitors that your site receives.
Let’s say you start a blog, over time you put out great content and wait for it to rank in SEO to get visitors to your blog.
You want to be able to measure the overall performance of your content and website over time, based on the traffic you receive.
Knowing how much traffic a website gets can help you better understand the type of content you need to focus on, and how to better promote your blog.
It’s also a good way to spy on the competition and see how and what they are doing differently than yours so that you can craft strategies to outdo them
Analyzing Your Website’s Traffic
If you want to check your website traffic, the most accurate and easiest way of doing this is by using an analytics tool such as Google Analytics 4 (GA4).
You will be able to see a lot of website stats and metrics (more on this below), such as the location of your visitors, average time spent on the site, bounce rate, keywords that bring you traffic, most visited pages, etc.
On top of that, make sure you have Google Search Console set up too. It is free, directly connected to Google, and shows you data no paid tool can replicate. Check out the screenshot below to see what it looks like in action. GA4 tells you what happens after someone lands on your site, GSC tells you how they found you in the first place. You need both.
Now that you’ve both established your setup, here are the key metrics you should really be looking at.
Website Traffic Metrics To Analyze
There are a couple of key website traffic metrics and stats that you should consider analyzing, such as:
- Unique visitors – The number of users who have visited the specific site (in a timeframe)
- Pageviews – The average pages per visit users browse on your site.
- Time spent on site – The average time visitors spend on a site
- Bounce rate – Visitors who leave the site after only viewing one page (in percentages)
- Engagement rate – The percentage of sessions in which users took action on your site (GA4’s replacement for bounce rate)
- Search traffic – Volume of organic search traffic that a website receives
- Referral traffic – View the sites that are referring to a website (and the percentage of referral traffic)
- Social media traffic – check the social media networks that are sending traffic to a website
- Other traffic channels – Paid advertising, email, direct traffic.
I would say that the top 3 metrics are the most important stats that you should watch out for: total unique visitors, page views, and average time spent on site.
The rest of them are of course good to know but only a few website traffic checker tools will provide you with that info.
Analyzing Competitors’ Website Traffic
Learning how to check website traffic of your competitors is also a pretty good digital marketing skill to have because this will help you better uncover important details such as:
- Their top content – see which of their content is doing good in Google and gets a lot of organic traffic and social shares.
- The traffic channels – check the majority of their website traffic channels, and see how and from what channels they get their visitors from.
- Inspect their keywords – This will help you better understand what keywords to focus on if you want to outrank them and also see the keywords gap.
- Spy on their ads – some few tools will allow you to even spy and check their PPC ads and display ads that they have running on Google, Bing, and other networks.
- Get their backlinks info – knowing where they get their backlinks from is huge, this allows you to replicate their strategies and get external links from the same sites.
There’s a reason why real-world cases of corporate espionage are taking place. Competing companies want to have the upper hand, so they engage in some of these “dirty” tactics.
Knowing extra details about your competition can be crucial in any type of business, for example, what they are working on, how they do it, who is helping them, etc.
That can translate easily into the online world too, with over 1.6 billion websites, chances are that a ton of them are in the same niche, competing with each other.
So what are we supposed to do? Go undercover as a mailroom boy and infiltrate their companies?
Nonsense…
There are easier and more cheaper and faster solutions than that. Oh and ethical.
These days there are many digital marketing tools to check website traffic of any website.
And now I’m going to share with you a list of the best ones for the job:
Best Tools for Checking Website Traffic
1. Ahrefs
Ahrefs is the go-to SEO tool for marketers, and in 2026 it has grown well beyond just backlink analysis (though it’s best for someone who does backlinks).
Let’s start with Site Explorer, you need to type in any domain and you get an instant full picture of what that site is doing across organic search, paid search and even AI visibility.
For instance, take wiz.io. First thing that jumps out is a DR of 83 with nearly 1 million backlinks across 13.5K referring domains, that tells you right away this is a heavily authoritative site in the cybersecurity space.
But the interesting thing is, despite all that authority, their organic traffic has been declining. That’s a sign worth digging into if you’re a competitor.
Now scroll down and Ahrefs will tell you exactly which countries are contributing to their traffic. More than 60% of their visits are from the US, so if you are moving into the same niche and targeting a different geography there is a gap there.
Paid search data is equally useful. From zenbusiness.com’s paid keywords report, you can see that they’re bidding on competitor brand names like “incfile” and “bizee”, a classic conquest strategy. You can see the exact keywords, the CPC they’re paying, their ad position, and even how much organic traffic those exact pages are getting. Where Ahrefs really shines is that combination of paid and organic data side by side.
And in 2026, as AI is reshaping SEO, Ahrefs and similar tools are also tracking AI citations, the number of times a site is referenced across Google AI Overview, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Copilot. Wiz.io has 1.6K+ citations of AI Overview alone, which shows how much they are out of the traditional search.
If you’re new to this, Ahrefs has a free tier called Ahrefs Webmaster Tools where you can analyze your own site for free (a great entry point before paying for a plan).
2. Semrush
Semrush is one of the most feature-rich tools in the industry, offering everything from SEO and content mapping, to competitive research and social media management. It has 55+ tools in one place, so if you want to avoid managing multiple platforms, it’s a solid all-in-one choice.
Plus it’s easy as heck to analyze and check website traffic of any site out there with their traffic analytics report tool:
As you can see, planable.io received 67.1K organic visits as of May 2026, with an Authority Score of 43, 6.9K referring domains, and 66.6K backlinks. But what makes Semrush particularly useful in 2026 is the AI Search panel, you can see that planable.io has an AI Visibility score of 22, with 1.3K mentions and 1.2K cited pages across AI platforms including ChatGPT, Google AI Overview, AI Mode, and Gemini.
Now for something a bit more in-depth:
Picture yourself starting a blog or website in the social media management space where Planable operates in, can you imagine the tremendous value of having access to the info presented in that picture above?
Their position on the SERP, the top keywords they rank for, the percentage of traffic each keyword brings in, keyword difficulty, search volume, search intent and even which SERP features they’re showing up in, all in one place. For example, you can see that planable.io ranks #1 for their brand term driving 4.3K visits, but also ranks #2 for “instagram reels download”, a non-branded keyword with 33.1K monthly searches. That’s the kind of insight that helps you find gaps and opportunities your competitors haven’t locked down yet.
And that’s not even a fraction of the stuff that you can uncover with Semrush.
Let’s take the above data as an example. Right away you can see that bolddesk.com is running paid traffic almost equal to their organic traffic, 5.1K paid visits right alongside 5.1K organic visits. That tells you right away this is a brand investing heavily in both channels at the same time.
Not only that, but you can see they have 531.8K backlinks across 3.4K referring domains and here’s the 2026 twist, Semrush now shows their AI Search visibility as well. In the AI Visibility category, Bolddesk is ranked 28th with 109 mentions and 361 cited pages in ChatGPT, Google AI Overview, AI Mode and Gemini. That is a layer of competitive intel that was not there a couple years ago.
This level of info and data is gold for someone in the same niche – you can see angles and ways to pull traffic from your competitors and bring it to your own site, whether that’s via Google rankings, paid ads, or, increasingly, AI search visibility.
3. SimilarWeb
SimilarWeb is more of a pure traffic intelligence platform than an SEO tool, which makes it a useful complement to Ahrefs or Semrush, rather than a replacement. You can easily pull up any website and see the breakdown of their traffic by channel, top referring sites, audience geography, device split, etc.
What it excels at is the channel breakdown. You can see it all at a glance, whether a competitor is a primarily organic search play, a heavy direct traffic player, or a heavily paid traffic dependent without digging through multiple reports. That sort of big picture is useful when you’re sizing up a niche before getting into it.
The thing is, you don’t even have to log in to get a quick look. Their free Chrome extension provides an instant snapshot on any site you visit. For example, open the extension on hostinger.com and you will immediately see 51.4M monthly visits, bounce rate of 27.68%, 7.7 pages per visit, and the average session duration is almost 8 minutes. That’s a lot of context that’s useful in about two seconds.
The free version gives you a decent snapshot, but more extensive data is locked behind the paid plan and Similarweb pricing can feel steep for smaller teams. It’s also worth noting that smaller sites with less than 50K visits a month typically don’t have reliable data, so this works best for researching established competitors rather than newer or niche sites.
4. SE Ranking
SE Ranking is a good mid-range option that has competitive research, rank tracking, backlink analysis, and site audits all in one. You might want to ask yourself if Ahrefs feels like overkill for what you need right now.
Their Competitive Research report provides a clean overview of any domain. A good example would be flippa.com. You get 38.8K organic clicks per month from 63.5K keywords, a Domain Trust score of 90 and 23K referring domains with 2.5M backlinks. Zero paid traffic, which tells you right away this is a brand betting all on organic.
The country break down is especially helpful here. India is responsible for 32% of Flippa’s organic traffic, the US is at 24%, the kind of geographic insight that helps you understand where a competitor is actually strong versus where there might be an opening.
SE Ranking now also tracks AI Search visibility, showing link visibility in AI Overview, AI Mode, Gemini, ChatGPT and Perplexity. AI Overview alone has 3.3K link presence on Flippa which is a meaningful signal of how well they are cited beyond traditional search.
They have a free trial so you can test before you buy.
5. Ubersuggest
Ubersuggest has come a long way from its humble beginnings as a basic keyword tool. Neil Patel’s platform now includes traffic analysis, competitor research, rank tracking, site audits, and even AI search visibility. And it all starts with a free tier that gives you 3 searches a day before you hit a paywall.
The Traffic Overview report is simple and easy to read. Take, for example, mailchimp.com. You can see 2.6M organic visits last month, a Domain Authority of 91, 312K organic keywords and almost 73M backlinks. The traffic split pie chart also shows you immediately that 99.93% of their traffic is organic with almost no paid investment which tells you a lot about their growth strategy in one glance.
It’s not the most in-depth tool on this list, and it doesn’t have data for referral, email and display ad traffic. For a quick competitive snapshot, though, or if you’re just starting and want something free and beginner friendly, it does the trick.
Conclusion
Learning how to analyze website traffic is an important skill and one that you must master if you want to become a great digital marketer.
Not only is it important to track how your site or blog is doing in terms of traffic, but it’s also wise to keep an eye on what your competition is cooking.
Key Takeaways
When checking the traffic of a website, focus on these metrics:
- Unique monthly visitors
- Average Page Visits
- Average Time Spent On-Site
- Bounce Rate
- Engagement Rate
- Organic Traffic
- Social Media Traffic
- Top Pages
The best tools to analyze website traffic are:
- Ahrefs
- Semrush
- SimilarWeb
- SE Ranking
- Ubersuggest
If you’ve just started a blog or created a website and want to learn how to get traffic and promote them check out these additional guides that I wrote:
Until next time, keep hustlin’
