How to Track Competitor Website Traffic in 2025

Ever wondered how much traffic your competitors receive and/or where it comes from? Ever thought about which organic keywords they rank for that could be implemented in your own SEO strategy?

Fortunately, you can keep an eye on your rivals’ website traffic using free and paid tools. This way, you’ll be able to discover valuable insights to optimize your site and enhance your marketing strategies.

In this post, we’ll take a closer look at the reasons for tracking competitor traffic and discuss key metrics to measure. Then, we’ll share three excellent tools for the job. Let’s get started!

Why Should You Track Competitor Website Traffic?

There are lots of benefits to conducting a competitor traffic analysis. Primarily, it’s a great way to gain valuable insights that can shape your site’s visibility, SEO strategies, and digital marketing campaigns.

By understanding what works for similar websites, you can make more informed decisions about your own. Perhaps you’ll uncover emerging trends, identify weaknesses, or pick out successful ranking keywords to implement in your content.

You’ll also gain a better understanding of your audiences’ activities and interests. Plus, most traffic data tools help you see which channels are driving people to your site, so you know where to focus your optimization efforts.

You might even be able to use traffic data to surpass your competitors’ performance. This way, you’d be able to direct your target audience away from other websites and keep them engaged with your content.

Finally, you can use competitors’ traffic data as a benchmark to gauge your own website’s performance. If your numbers are a little low, but so are your rivals’, there could be market-wide trends and patterns that explain these findings.

Key Metrics to Monitor on Your Competitors’ Websites

Now that you know the benefits of monitoring your competitors’ web traffic, let’s take a look at the metrics to assess:

• Organic search traffic. This data enables you to judge your rivals’ keyword placements, organic click-through rate (CTR), and general organic search visibility.
• Referral traffic. Thisdescribes the sources that drive traffic to your competitors’ websites. However, you’ll also want to evaluate the authority of these sources.
• Paid traffic. Thislets you track the success of your competitors’ sponsored search efforts. You can measure cost per click (CPC), CTR, and ad spend.
• Social traffic. With this metric, you can see how much traffic data comes from your rivals’ social media channels. You can also determine the effectiveness of campaigns by looking at likes, shares, and comments.

For each type of traffic data mentioned above, you’ll want to focus on long-term and short-term traffic to get a full picture of competitor performance.

However, you can also target additional metrics during your traffic analysis. For starters, it can be useful to assess engagement metrics like average visit duration, pages per visit, and bounce rate.

If you want to measure SEO performance, you can conduct keyword research using a tool like Google Keyword Planner. This helps you spot top-performing keywords and highlight low-difficulty terms that might be easier to rank for.

3 Tools to Track Competitor Website Traffic

Now, let’s explore three of the best tools to help you conduct a thorough competitor analysis.

1. Similarweb

Similarweb is a flexible traffic checker tool that makes it easy to compare your website traffic against your competitors’ performance.

You don’t have to register for a plan to access valuable traffic insights. Instead, you can get started using the free website traffic checker, which also gives you important engagement stats:

With the free checker, you’ll get traffic data from the last three months. This includes:

• Top referring websites
• Top ad destinations
• Social traffic sources
• Top paid search terms
• Top organic search terms
• Top marketing channels
• Monthly visits (and monthly unique visits)
• Global rankings (as well as country rankings and industry rankings)

You can also compare traffic volume changes over time, and view the percentage of traffic that comes from desktop and mobile devices:

If you sign up for a paid plan, you’ll have access to more information, including bounce rates. You’ll also be able to measure specific pages or funnels to see how effectively competitors are monetizing traffic.

Similarweb even lets you configure a tracker that monitors up to 25 rival websites to register shifts in metrics.

Price

You can analyze any website’s traffic for free with Similarweb. For more detailed insights (and more historical data), you’ll need to upgrade to a paid plan, which starts at $125 per month.

2. Semrush

Semrush is one of the most popular SEO tools on the market, ideal for comparing competitor tactics. You can register for free, but you’re limited to just ten requests per day.

Once you’ve set up your account, you’ll get access to a dashboard where you can try different research tools. For example, the keyword gap analysis tool lets you enter five domains (including your own) to see which terms competitor websites rank for:

You can also differentiate between organic and paid keywords. If you go to Traffic Analytics, you can compare five URLs directly:

You can see monthly visits, monthly unique visits, average visit duration, bounce rates, and more. With the paid version, you can also find out how many sessions ended in a purchase.

What’s great about Semrush is that it highlights the difference in traffic performance (e.g. percentage increase/decrease between the last two months). Typically, this tool is best for gaining valuable insights about organic and paid traffic to optimize your marketing strategies.

Note that you’ll need a paid plan to run a more thorough competitor website traffic analysis. This includes details like demographics, traffic sources, top pages, geographical data, and more.

Price

Semrush lets you make ten requests for free. If you need more, you’ll have to upgrade from $139.95 per month.

3. Ahrefs

Ahrefs is ideal for comparing organic search traffic sources and volumes. You can also use it to conduct full site audits, build competitor backlink profiles, and even forecast competitor website traffic.

Unlike other options we’ve looked at, you’ll have to pay to use Ahrefs for your competitor research. Although there’s a free version (Webmaster Tools), this only lets you run site audits and keyword research for verified domains.

Like Semrush, you can look into organic and paid search traffic, identify keyword gaps and backlink sources, and monitor content performance. A neat feature of Ahrefs is that you can also view traffic estimates for top-ranking keywords, which lets you set expectations for similar-targeting pages on your site.

Price

Although Ahrefs offers free tools, it doesn’t let you track competitor data. Therefore, you’ll need a paid plan, which starts at $99 per month.

Conclusion

An effective way to improve your site’s visibility and boost your marketing efforts is to monitor your competitors’ traffic. This can reveal top referral sources, average visit durations, keyword gaps, and other valuable insights.

Here are three powerful tools that let you check your competitors’ website traffic:

1. Similarweb: Best free version.
2. Semrush: Best for measuring organic search traffic.
3. Ahrefs: Best for revealing referral traffic.

Although competitor analysis can enhance your website, you might also be interested in upgrading your web hosting solution. At NameHero, we offer NVMe storage (faster than SSD), built-in LiteSpeed technology, and a free security shield. Check out our hosting plans today!