How to Check Website Traffic: Yours and Competitors

A click is a person selecting a link to the site in Google’s results. A session is a period of that person’s activity on the site, recorded by the analytics tag installed on the page. Google warns in its Search Central documentation, updated on 7 January 2026, that clicks and sessions are calculated differently and that comparing them will usually show different numbers.

Consent is one of the reasons: if the site asks permission to track and the visitor opts out, that visit never reaches Google Analytics, according to the same documentation. Search Console does not depend on that tag, because it counts from the search engine itself.

Similarweb explains on its methodology page, updated on 8 February 2026, that it combines anonymous browsing data collected by its products installed on millions of devices, public data, and data from partners such as internet service providers. It is a sample of people browsing, extrapolated to the whole.

Ahrefs calculates its organic traffic metric differently, according to its help centre, updated on 3 September 2026: it finds the keywords for which the site ranks in organic search results, estimates the traffic from each one based on the ranking position, the monthly search volume and an estimated click-through rate for that position, and adds it up. Ahrefs itself asks users to treat those figures as estimates.

There is also an open-source route. OpenSEO describes itself on its website, checked on 12 October 2026, as the open source alternative to Ahrefs and Semrush: it can be self-hosted for free, analyses competitor visibility and takes its data from DataForSEO. It is the tool DoGeo used for the comparison in the next section, so its estimates share the same limits as the rest.

Comparing DataForSEO’s estimate with Search Console on three sites, DoGeo found that the error runs in both directions. For Kulturo, DataForSEO estimated 1,097 organic visits a month from Spain alone, while Search Console recorded 409 clicks in August 2026 from all countries: the estimate was 2.7 times the real figure. For HeyTalent, 2,338 estimated visits against 679 real clicks: 3.4 times.

On a site specialising in rigid inflatable boats the error went the other way. DataForSEO estimated 6 organic visits a month from Spain while Search Console recorded 108 clicks from Spain in seven weeks.

For Kulturo and HeyTalent the comparison favours the tool, which estimates one country against clicks from all of them, and it still overshoots. Three sites are enough not to take an estimate as a real figure, not to set a margin of error that would hold for any site.

Pew Research Center measured it with the real browsing of 900 US adults in March 2025 and published the results on 22 July 2025. People who saw an AI summary on Google clicked a traditional search result in 8% of visits to the results page, against 15% for those who did not see one. A click on a link inside the summary itself happened in just 1% of visits.

For anyone reading their traffic, the consequence is that a drop in visits is not always a drop in interest. The brand may be appearing in the answer without anyone coming through, and that is measured with other tools, covered in the difference between being mentioned and being cited.

At Kulturo, between the October–December 2025 quarter and the June–August 2026 quarter, clicks went from 209 to 1,243 and impressions from 2,411 to 251,067: 5.9 times the clicks and 104.1 times the impressions, according to Kulturo’s Google Search Console.

At HeyTalent, from March to August 2026, clicks went from 69 to 679 and impressions from 5,021 to 128,192: 9.8 times the clicks and 25.5 times the impressions, according to HeyTalent’s Google Search Console.

Search Console also has its own report on generative AI in Search, still in beta, which separates impressions inside Google’s AI answers; how to read it is explained in how to tell whether Google already cites you.

According to Google Analytics help, accessed on 6 October 2026, the “AI Assistant” channel covers people arriving from sources such as ChatGPT, Gemini, DeepSeek or Grok: when the referring site is on Google’s list of assistants, the visit is recorded with the medium “ai-assistant”.

That channel only counts people who clicked. To know whether an assistant reads the site even when nobody visits afterwards, bot logging is the technical source: a rule in the site’s firewall or CDN that logs, without blocking, the requests from each bot, identified by its name and, where the provider publishes its addresses, verified by IP. ChatGPT-User, Claude-User and Perplexity-User are, according to OpenAI, Anthropic and Perplexity, the bots that open a page when someone asks in a conversation. This is what DoGeo sets up for each client, with a monthly count per bot and per page.

What the log does not show is what the assistant writes in its answer. Measuring whether it names the brand, and with which source, is a separate job, covered in how to track rankings and AI visibility.

The business block comes first because it justifies the rest: between 15% and 20% of new clients at Kulturo and HeyTalent come through GEO, according to what they say when they sign, and that route never shows up in full in any traffic tool.