The Organic traffic metric in Ahrefs is an estimation of how many clicks from google your target website, subfolder or URL gets each month.
How Organic Traffic is calculated:
We find all the keywords for which your target ranks in the top 100 organic search results.
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.
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:
The frequency you select affects the estimated traffic:
You can choose between daily, weekly, monthly. Here is how organic traffic is estimated differently:
Daily - We take the CTR of all keywords that the target ranks for that day, multiply by each keywords' respective search volume, and sum up traffic for all keywords. Each day follows the GMT +00:00 timezone.
Weekly - We do the same thing as Daily, but take the average of 7 days between Monday and Sunday of that week.
Monthly - We do the same thing as Daily, but take the average across all days of that month.
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