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What is Organic Traffic in Ahrefs and how do we calculate it?
What is Organic Traffic in Ahrefs and how do we calculate it?

Find out what the Organic Traffic metric is and how accurate it is

Rebekah avatar
Written by Rebekah
Updated over a week ago


This number is an estimation of how much organic search traffic your target website, subfolder or URL gets each month.

How it’s calculated:

  1. We find all the keywords for which your target ranks in the top 100 organic search results.

  2. We estimate the search traffic your target gets from each of those keywords based on its ranking position, monthly search volume, and our estimated CTR for that position.

  3. We sum up the traffic estimations of each keyword

NOTE: Remember to treat the organic traffic estimations in Ahrefs as precisely that: estimations.

While these estimates don’t, and can’t, show you exactly how much organic traffic a website gets, they work incredibly well for comparison. For example, it’s fantastic for learning if your competitors’ websites get more or less organic search traffic than your own.

Although sometimes our estimations can have discrepancy, it is highly consistent. As such, you can use the following formula to estimate your competitor's traffic:

Ahrefs traffic discrepancy formula

FAQs

How come this number doesn’t match what I see in Google Search Console?

The number that Ahrefs shows is an estimate, not the actual search traffic data of a website. It’s not possible for all the variables in our traffic estimation formula to be 100% accurate. Learn why

How come this number doesn’t match what I see in Google Analytics?

While Ahrefs shows an estimate of the search traffic of a website, Google Analytics shows total traffic (direct, paid, social, etc). So these two figures are likely to be quite different.

How is your CTR calculated?

For most keywords, we use the third-party data sources to estimate averaged CTR values. This is then applied based on SERP position to estimate the amount of clicks each google result receives.

Overall clicks per search can be found in Keywords Explorer:


How do your traffic estimations match up against other SEO tools’?

We will, of course, tell you that we have the best quality data ;)

On a more serious note, we once tried all the leading total traffic estimation tools and did some experimenting to see which was the most accurate. Read all about it


Read more:

Watch a tutorial:

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