How Accurate Are the Search Traffic Estimations in Ahrefs? (New Research)

One of the astir communal usage cases of Ahrefs is to cheque however overmuch integrated hunt postulation a fixed website (or webpage) gets.

It is wide known that the hunt postulation numbers successful Ahrefs are simply estimations. But however acold bash they deviate from the existent postulation numbers?

We decided to tally a tiny survey and effort to quantify that.

What to expect from Ahrefs’ postulation estimations

Before I stock the results of our survey with you, I deliberation it is rather important that you recognize however Ahrefs postulation estimates are calculated successful the first place.

Here’s what it looks similar successful a nutshell:

1. Take all keywords that a website ranks for
2. Pull the monthly hunt measurement of each keyword
3. Look up that website’s ranking presumption for each keyword
4. Predict the CTR for each of their hunt snippets
5. Sum up clicks from each keyword and compute the full estimated monthly hunt traffic

Can you archer astatine which measurement the discrepancies footwear in? (Hint: each one)

• Keywords – It is practically intolerable to cognize all the keywords that a fixed website is ranking for.
• Monthly hunt volumes – These aren’t peculiarly precise either (see our caller study).
• Ranking positions – The SERPs are precise volatile. Today, your leafage ranks #3; a time later, it ranks #4.
• CTR – It is incredibly hard to foretell the CTR of a leafage connected a SERP. There are conscionable excessively galore factors to consider: hunt intent, ads, SERP features, marque affinity, etc.

As you tin tell, the information that we (or immoderate different SEO tool) usage for computing the hunt postulation estimations has galore issues that are astir intolerable to fix. And these issues inevitably impact the prime of the resulting postulation estimations.

And yet, adjacent though our postulation estimations whitethorn deviate from the existent information rather a bit, they’re inactive bully capable to beryllium of immense worth for integer selling professionals of all kinds. 

Especially truthful erstwhile 1 understands however these values are being computed (which you bash now) and can, therefore, origin successful immoderate level of discrepancy portion utilizing that information (more connected that later).

So that aside, let’s yet spot the results of our research.

How close are Ahrefs’ hunt postulation estimations?

This precise survey is inspired by the bully folks astatine AuthorityHacker. They precocious performed probe comparing the prime of hunt postulation estimations from six antithetic SEO tools.

In their study, Ahrefs turned retired to beryllium the victor (with an mean discrepancy of 22.5% and 0.99 correlation with GSC data).

But that survey was done connected a tiny illustration of conscionable 50 websites. So we decided to replicate it astatine a larger standard and spot however the numbers change.

In our study, we took 1,635 random websites and compared their monthly GSC postulation successful the U.S. to their monthly U.S. integrated postulation estimates successful Ahrefs.

We studied the aforesaid 2 factors:

1. How overmuch Ahrefs’ postulation estimations deviate from GSC
2. How accordant our postulation estimations are erstwhile compared to GSC

Deviation

In our studied illustration of 1,635 websites, the median deviation turned retired to beryllium 49.52%.

In different words, astir of the clip you tin expect Ahrefs to misreport a website’s U.S. postulation by up to fractional of its value. 

This whitethorn look similar a lot. But successful reality, the borderline of our mistake mostly depends connected the benignant of website and the manufacture the tract is in. For immoderate websites, we are disconnected by little than 5%. For immoderate others, we tin beryllium disconnected by much than 1,000%.

But much often than not, our estimates are alternatively good:

To enactment our median deviation of 49.52% successful perspective, we besides calculated it for SEMrush, and it turned retired to beryllium 68.36%.

Consistency

Here’s what the “consistency” of postulation estimations refers to:

If 1 website gets much postulation than the different website (according to GSC data), that should clasp existent erstwhile looking astatine Ahrefs’ information (regardless of the accuracy of the estimates).

As you whitethorn person already guessed, this tin beryllium studied by calculating the bully aged correlation betwixt the 2 sets of values.

In our illustration size of 1,635 websites, the monthly GSC postulation successful the U.S. correlated with that of Ahrefs’ astatine 0.76 (Pearson’s). This means that the supra connection volition clasp existent successful the immense bulk of cases.

Notably, SEMrush’s was 0.74 for the aforesaid acceptable of websites.

A workaround for manually fixing the discrepancy

As you conscionable learned, Ahrefs tin beryllium disconnected by a alternatively sizeable magnitude erstwhile estimating a website’s traffic. But astatine the aforesaid time, it is highly accordant successful its postulation estimations. Even much truthful if the websites you’re comparing beryllium to the aforesaid industry.

What this means is that you tin amended estimation the existent hunt postulation of your competitors by utilizing this elemental formula:

The narration betwixt GSC postulation and Ahrefs postulation for your ain website should clasp astir existent for your competitors’ (given that they’re successful the aforesaid niche arsenic you). So much often than not, utilizing this look should nutrient a beauteous close result.

Final words

Hopefully, this helped you folks recognize what you tin expect from Ahrefs’ hunt postulation estimations and however to enactment astir the discrepancy to get overmuch much close data.

But astir important of all, the results of this probe volition present service arsenic a notation constituent for our merchandise squad connected our quest to further amended the accuracy of our estimations. Even though it is technically intolerable to marque them perfect, there’s inactive rather a spot of country for improvement—which we tin effort to address.

As always, should you person immoderate comments oregon questions, you tin find maine on Twitter.

P.S. Big acknowledgment to Alex from our Data Science squad for helping maine with this.