How to Check Website Traffic: Your Own Site vs. Competitors

Checking traffic means two different things: for your own site you get real data; for anyone else's you only get an estimate. Mixing them up is behind a lot of bad competitor analysis.

Your own site: real data

• Google Search Console: clicks, impressions and average position from Google Search, by query and page. Free, and the best view of SEO performance.
• Analytics (Google Analytics 4, Plausible, Umami and others): visits from every source, including direct, social and paid.
• Server logs: the most complete, but you analyse them yourself and they include bots.

Competitors: estimates only

Third-party tools cannot see another site's analytics. Roughly, they find which keywords the site ranks for and where, multiply each keyword's search volume by the click-through rate for that position, and add it up to a monthly organic traffic figure.

• It covers organic Google traffic only: no direct, social, paid or email visits.
• It depends on the keyword database; brand and very long-tail queries are easy to miss.
• AI Overviews and shopping units reduce real clicks, so estimates can run high.
• Use it to compare sites and trends, not as an exact visit count.

A real example

On 29 September 2026 we checked backlinko.com (United States) with our website traffic checker: about 179,341 estimated monthly organic visits from 38,777 ranking keywords. Among its top traffic keywords were "reddit popularity" and "google trend", which are not its core topics. That is the catch with competitor traffic: a big total is not the same as traffic relevant to you.

Using traffic data for competitor research

• Look at which keywords bring the traffic, not just the total, and isolate the part relevant to your business.
• Compare several competitors in the same market and see who is growing.
• Find keywords they rank for and you do not, and turn them into content. The CallAI competitor gap pipeline lists them directly.