organic traffic can mean 2 things (or more, but these 2 are the important ones):
- traffic from google organic search
- traffic from certain things (feed, posts, etc) of social media
When you say that you wish to check the organic traffic I assume that you mean organic traffic from google specifically, right? If you mean organic traffic from google PLUS other search engines (Bing, Duckduckgo, etc) PLUS also organic traffic from social media then you should definitely believe what GA4 shows as Google Analytics monitors ALL traffic from ALL sources (direct visits, google hits, Bing hits, Facebook hits, Twitter hits, BlackHatWorld hits, etc... every little click or visit of your landing page - no matter which source it comes from - is tracked with GA4, while Google Search Console only shows you what happens to your site / page in google ONLY)
So, you need to decide what you want to track / see and check either GSC or GA4.
But - unfortunately - things are not as simple as checking either GA4 or GSC because both of these mediums track different things, and from different perspectives, so - in reality - you STILL need to dive deep into the reports and segment them as granularly as possible if you wish to gather real and actionable insights. Tracking and interpreting stats takes a lot of time and deep diving into the details, so be prepared to spend hours staring at, and comparing stats and graphs like a lunatic if you wish to know EXACTLY what your visitors are doing and how to edit your tracked pages in order to force your visitors to take certain actions...
Anyway, I could say a lot more but I will probably confuse you even more than I already did, so I'm stopping here
But to answer your question as simple as possible (while still accurately), I will say GA4. Google Analytics will give a better idea of your traffic than GSC, so choose to believe GA4 until you figure out how to blend and interpret the stats given by both GA4 and GSC as both of them matter and both of them need to be taken into account to get a better idea of what's going on with your site's traffic...
again, for simplicity's sake, choose to believe GA4, but both GA4 and GSC can be correct depending on what you'd like to know / see.
For example, GSC shows the number of clicks and impressions that a page gets, while GA shows sessions (on top of / alongside clicks, impressions and a whole lot other metrics), and - as you can probably tell - sessions and clicks are 2 different metrics. So, depending on what you're more interested in, you can choose to believe either GA or GSC, although a smart SEO believes both of them partially, but none of them fully because google has this tendency of lying to people.
Besides, it's possible that what you see in your Performance report in GSC is only clicks from desktop devices for example, while GA might show you both desktop + mobile devices. So, you gotta tally up the clicks for both the desktop and the mobile devices inside of your GSC if you wish to get an idea that's closer to what GA shows...
And to make things worse, GA might only show you sessions from people that are logged into their google accounts... or they might include bot clicks into their reporting (which - from what I remember - GA does do almost always unless the bots are filtered out somehow)... and if I remember correctly GA also shows only hits / sessions / clicks / whatever from people that don't have Java disabled on their computers... or at least it used to be like this several years ago, God knows what changes google have done to their (garbage from what I've heard) GA4 lately...
So, again, you gotta dive really deep into checking every god damn crappy stat and metric in BOTH your GSC and GA4 accounts if you wish to get a slightly more accurate idea of what's going on with your site's traffic. If you choose to believe only one or the other, you might be misled (and most of the time you probably will), and this is done by design, so thank google for screwing people over and forcing them to waste their lives analyzing (misleading anyway) stats like lunatics for several hours a day. That's what google want from us (to keep us day and night on their platforms so they can monetize even our last breath)....
Anyway, I'm starting to get triggered again and it's not good... If all of these seem confusing to you just use GA4 to get a rough idea of your traffic and then focus on making money instead of obsessing over misleading stats. Life's too short to waste it on google's wicked engineering
