Have you ever wondered where a website's traffic really comes from? Because sometimes it's a place you'd never guess.
Until now, Ahrefs showed you the organic search traffic of any website. But search is only one of the many places websites get visitors from.
Meet: Traffic Analytics, a new set of reports in Site Explorer that gives you a full breakdown of any website's traffic: search, AI, social, paid, referrals, and more.
With the "missing puzzle" now in place, you can finally see how your competitors earn their audience, and how your own traffic mix stacks up against theirs.
What is Traffic Analytics?
Traffic Analytics sits right inside Site Explorerand acts as an extension of it. Hence, it can be considered a powerful competitive intelligence tool in itself. Site Explorer's better half if you may.
Enter any domain (a competitor's, a prospect's, your own) and get an estimate of its total traffic across 10+ channels. No access to the site or JavaScript needed.
Here's what you get:
- Channels: 10+ channels a site depends on: from search and paid to social, referrals, and AI
- Sources: the individual referrers behind each channel, like Google, Bing, ChatGPT, Reddit, and affiliate networks
- Landing pages: the pages that bring the most visits
- Previous pages: the pages visitors were on right before landing on the site
- Page types: whether traffic comes from articles, tools, listicles, or something else
- Geography: the biggest markets and the channel mix in each
- Audience overlap: the other websites the same visitors browse
Traffic Analytics vs Web Analytics
Wait, but what if I use Web Analytics, is that the same? Not quite.
Ahrefs Web Analytics tracks exact visitor data, but only for sites you own and verify. Traffic Analytics estimates traffic for ANY domain, so you get the same view of a competitor as you do of yourself.
How to use Traffic Analytics for competitive research
The examples below use asana.com, but you can run them on any competitor you want.
1. Compare your traffic makeup against competitors
This is Traffic Analytics' main use case. Open the Channels report for your domain, then for each competitor, and compare the mix.
Who leans on search? Who buys traffic? Who has built a social or referral engine? The gaps show you which strategies competitors rely on, so you can reverse-engineer the successful ones.
For asana.com, Social (3.0%) and Paid search (2.9%) shares are almost identical. That suggests a strong social following that brings in as many visits as the money they pour into their Google Ads budget.
2. See who's getting traffic from AI
AI traffic has its own line in the Channels report. Expand it to see the AI platforms and landing pages behind it.
For asana.com, AI search brings 116K visits, which is roughly 0.5% of its traffic. ChatGPT and Claude drive about 89% of those, with Gemini a distant third. The top landing pages are OAuth authorization pages, which likely means people are connecting Asana to their AI assistants.
To put it simply: Brand Radar (our AI visibility tool) shows where AI mentions your competitors, while Traffic Analytics shows whether those mentions turn into visits.
3. Find your competitors' biggest markets, and how they win in each
The Geography report shows where a site's visitors come from, and lets you check the channel mix of each country individually.
For example, asana.com's top market is the United States, where the top 3 sources are: (1) Direct, (2) Referral, and (3)Search.
But its second-largest market is Japan, which is easy to miss. There, (1) Direct is followed by (2) Paid search, not (3)Referral. That likely means project management is a competitive category in Japan, and paid search is the way in.
4. Find who you're really competing with
Another useful report is Audience overlap, which lists the websites that share a site's visitors.
For asana.com, the obvious ones are complementary tools like Slack, Loom, HubSpot, and Zapier, plus a direct competitor: monday.com.
Hover over the Traffic mix bar to see how any of them earns its traffic. monday.com, for example, gets 17.4% of its traffic from paid.
Sort by Affinity to surface the surprising ones: how much more likely the site's visitors are to visit a website than the average visitor.
For asana.com, that's quip-amazon.com, which looks like an internal Amazon task tool, and harvestapp.com, a time tracking tool.
Complementary tools are partnership candidates, while indirect competitors show who you're fighting for the same attention — even if you don't share common keywords whatsover.
To analyze customers instead of all visitors, swap the target for the product's sign-in URL and switch the mode from Subdomains to Domain. Now you'll see which websites actual users are more likely to visit.
5. Find the outlets that quietly send traffic
The Previous pages report shows the pages visitors were on right before they landed on a site. It's where you'll find the publishers, forums, and comparison pages sending traffic without you noticing.
For asana.com, about 367,000 visits a month come from WhatsApp, which likely means people share Asana forms and links inside the app.
6. Learn which types of content bring in the visitors
The Page types report groups a site's pages into types, like Article, Landing, and Listing, so you can see what kind of content format wins and create more of it.
For asana.com, Guide articles bring in close to 268,000 visits a month. There's also an outlier: a template for a social media calendar. If you compete with Asana, that's a hint to build similar, sticky resources.
A note on the numbers
Traffic Analytics numbers are estimates. We get the data from our data partners and enhance it with Ahrefs' own web index and modeling to fill the gaps, but it should be treated as estimates, not exact counts.
In practice, trust the channel mix and the trends more than the absolute visit numbers. For exact numbers on your own site, use Web Analytics.
Pricing and what's next
Traffic Analytics is in beta and works on every Ahrefs plan, including Free:
- Any website (competitors included): $99/mo, or $990/yr, as an add-on.
- Your own verified websites: free.
Both give you full reports with history going back to March 2025.
Coming next: Traffic & Market reports ($299/mo), including market share by category.
Check where your competitors' traffic really comes from
Search is only one piece of the traffic puzzle. Traffic Analytics is the missing piece that shows you the rest, for any website, inside the tool you already use.
