How do SEMRush and Ahrefs estimate site traffic

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Redaline

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So I am wondering on how exactly are tools like SEMRush or Ahrefs doing traffic estimation?

The only thing that crosses my mind is that they have their own properties lying around with different positions
in SERP and they basically extrapolate what they can observe by themselves.

Can anyone shed any light on this?
 
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Redaline said:
The only thing that crosses my mind is that they have their own properties lying around with different positions
in SERP and they basically extrapolate what they can observe by themselves.
Click to expand...
Their traffic estimates are usually not very correct. So it's that is certainly not the case.

There's usually huge discrepancy between semrush estimate and the actual figures, this is most evident in keywords that have image pack at the top.


I believe they most likely have a formula used in estimating traffic, they do these with well known information like position 1 of Google is believe to get about 20% of all clicks for each keyword.

So they would apply their formula and figure out a way to reduce the % the further you go down the result page.
 
praetserge said:
https://help.ahrefs.com/en/articles/1077709-how-does-ahrefs-estimate-ctr-when-calculating-search-traffic
Click to expand...

I read that, but it basically says we have a secret source of user data on which we base our predictions (Clickstream data they mention). That would imply that Ahrefs is doing some sort of user analytics harvesting, either directly buying that from web sites or, for example, from popular browser extensions or similar.
 
Redaline said:
I read that, but it basically says we have a secret source of user data on which we base our predictions (Clickstream data they mention). That would imply that Ahrefs is doing some sort of user analytics harvesting, either directly buying that from web sites or, for example, from popular browser extensions or similar.
Click to expand...
1. Maybe, they own some popular extensions.
2. Not so long ago they advised webmasters to connect their GSC to Ahrefs.
 
Cool insights, cheers for everything.
 
Redaline said:
So I am wondering on how exactly are tools like SEMRush or Ahrefs doing traffic estimation?

The only thing that crosses my mind is that they have their own properties lying around with different positions
in SERP and they basically extrapolate what they can observe by themselves.

Can anyone shed any light on this?
Click to expand...
As per my knowledge the estimations aren't 100% accurate, but quite actual . They estimate traffics through SERP's and keywords that a website is ranking for and search volumes relevant with those keywords, competition of keywords, social media traffic, etc.
 
SEMrush and Ahrefs estimate site traffic by analyzing clickstream data from a panel of internet users, combined with data from various other sources. They also use their own proprietary algorithms to estimate traffic for websites that don't have Google Analytics installed. However, these estimates are not always 100% accurate.
 
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