How accurate is SEMRush for Google Traffic estimates?

[botboy]

I know for my own sites it’s better to just use google analytics. But when I want to look at competitors, I see some traffic estimates that to me I’m just not sure about in terms of accuracy.

does anyone know how accurate semrush is for this? I mean when I look at the estimates for my own sites on both ga and semrush it seems pretty similar but i dont think thats a big enough pool of data or whatever its called.

 

[roydan]

4/10

The best way to see is to compare a website you have the analytics of with what you see on SEMRush.

I think I did it once on another forum. I can look it up and share a link in DM.

Edit:
Not sure if traffic was one of the thinks I compared.

 

[Spicy Nug]

It's best to stick to your own websites. I use it for competitor research but the thing is that it's not really all that accurate. Like you I checked my own sites on it and I remember it thought that I had like twice as much organic traffic than I really did.

 

[Champagne]

In my experience, SEMrush is usually decent for spotting trends and comparing sites against each other, but I wouldn't trust the absolute traffic numbers too much. For larger sites, the estimates are often in the right ballpark. For smaller or niche sites, they can be way off.

 

[SMTasker]

Depends on the niche and age as well, on newer sites the estimates i got were pretty close, on older ones were quite far off, but yeah, ideally take them as estimates or trends rather than exact numbers.

 

[notNewB]

Judging by my current site, Semrush is slightly more accurate than Ahrefs for traffic estimation, though neither is nearly reliable.

The reason for that slight up is, I think, the keyword discovery. Ahrefs sees only 150 keywords ranking for my domain, while semrush sees 900, which is closer to what is accurate.

I'd also recommend checking SimilarWeb for traffic estimation. It accounts traffic sources other than organic so you get more or less accurate number compared to what you get from semrush or ahrefs.