How to check the traffic sources of a website

You cannot open a competitor's analytics, so nobody can show you their real channel mix. What you can do is check the traffic sources of a website one channel at a time, using whichever free source sees that channel best, then compare the shape across competitors.

The shape is the useful part. It tells you where each competitor invests, where they are absent, and therefore where it is cheap or expensive for you to compete.

Prices below were read from each vendor's own pricing page on 4 October 2026.

The quick version: Similarweb's free page

Open similarweb.com/website/ followed by the domain. The free page shows the top three marketing channels by share, the organic and paid split of search traffic, some top referring sites, the social networks that send visits, and a count of display publishers. Most of those sections are labelled desktop only.

On 4 October 2026 the free page for semrush.com, for example, put direct traffic first at 45% of desktop visits, then organic search, then referrals. The full channel breakdown needs a Similarweb trial. Semrush's equivalent, Acquisition Channel Mix, sits in its Traffic & Market toolkit at $289 a month billed annually.

Treat the result as a hypothesis. It is modelled, it is desktop-weighted, and for small sites it can be badly wrong. The guide to checking competitor website traffic covers how far to trust these figures. Then check each channel separately.

Check each traffic source of a website, channel by channel

Organic search

Semrush's free Website Traffic Checker and Ahrefs' free checker give an estimated organic figure and the top pages behind it.

Then split brand from non-brand. If most of a competitor's organic traffic comes from people searching their own name, their search channel is really a brand channel. You will not take that traffic with content. You compete with them on category and comparison terms instead.

Paid search and paid social

The ad libraries show what is running now: Google's Ads Transparency Center, the Meta Ad Library, the TikTok Ad Library and the LinkedIn Ad Library are all free. The guide to seeing every ad a competitor runs covers each one. For paid search keywords, SpyFu's Basic plan at $39 a month and the paid keyword reports in Semrush and Ahrefs estimate which terms they bid on.

A faster check sits in their own code. Open the homepage, view source, and search for these strings:

Many sites load tags through Google Tag Manager, so the page source shows only an ID like GTM-ABC1234. The container itself is public: open googletagmanager.com/gtm.js?id= followed by that ID and search the file for the same strings. A tag proves they have measured that platform at some point, not that they are spending today. Confirm in the ad library. The PPC competitor analysis guide takes the paid side further.

Social

Similarweb's free page lists which networks send desktop visits and in what proportion. Beyond that, social is measured in attention rather than visits: follower growth, posting rhythm, which posts get engagement. Check the link in each bio as well. A tagged link with utm_source=instagram tells you they measure it as a traffic channel, not just a brand one.

Referral

Referral is the most underrated channel in a competitor's mix and the easiest to copy. Look for:

• Directories and review sites where they are listed and you are not.
• Marketplaces and integration directories. An app store listing or a partner's integrations page can send steady, high-intent visits.
• Affiliates and partners. A /partners or /affiliates page, or links carrying ?ref= or ?via=, means other sites send them visitors, often for a commission.
• Product loops. A "powered by" link in a widget or email footer that sends visitors back to them.

Backlink tools show where the links are. The competitor backlink analysis guide covers sorting them into the ones you can get.

Direct and brand

Direct traffic is mostly people who already know the name: returning customers, people typing the address, and for software companies, customers logging in. Google Trends shows how brand search interest compares across competitors, and keyword tools give the monthly volume of each brand name.

Email, events and the rest

Some channels leave almost no public trace. Subscribe to each competitor's newsletter with a dedicated inbox and note how often they send and what they offer. Watch for webinars, events and podcast appearances. Offline spend, such as TV, radio or direct mail, usually shows up only as a spike in brand searches.

The UTM trail

Campaign tags leak. Two places to read them:

Ad destination URLs. Open the ads in the libraries and copy the landing page links. The utm_campaign values often name the audience, the country or the offer.

The Wayback Machine's index. Its crawler picks up tagged URLs from around the web. This query lists every archived homepage URL carrying a campaign tag:

https://web.archive.org/cdx/search/cdx?url=competitor.com/&matchType=prefix&collapse=urlkey&fl=original&filter=original:.*utm_campaign.*

A listing pulled on 4 October 2026 for one software company's site included a Google Ads brand campaign tag for Canada (utm_campaign=Brand_CA) and a utm_campaign=powered_by tag, which points to a referral loop from its own product. Nobody announced either.

A worked example

Say you run an online bookkeeping service and check three competitors:

The reading: A lives off its brand and its marketplace listings, B wins on content, C buys its traffic. B's non-brand content is the hardest to replicate but the cheapest per visit to compete with. C's auction is the expensive one to enter. A's marketplace listings are a referral source you can probably join this month.

What the mix tells you about where to compete

A channel where every competitor is heavy is crowded and expensive. Compete there only with a clear edge, such as a better offer or a narrower audience.

A channel nobody uses is either an untested opportunity or a channel that does not work in your category. Test it small before you commit a budget.

A brand-heavy competitor cannot be outranked on its own name. Compete on the category and comparison searches people make before they know it.

A referral-heavy competitor has done partnership work you can often repeat. The listings and directories are usually open to you too.

Figo covers several of these channels for each tracked competitor every week: estimated organic traffic and rankings, Google, Meta and TikTok ads, Instagram and Facebook posts, and Reddit threads that mention them. Plans start at $49 a month for three competitors. Ours, so judge accordingly. It does not estimate referral, direct or email traffic or the overall channel split, so for the full mix in percentages, Similarweb is the tool.