Competitive intelligence tools: who still gets traffic

Google sent 29% less estimated traffic to competitive intelligence tools this year. Across 46 tools, combined estimated US organic traffic fell from 15.54 million visits a month in September 2025 to 11.04 million in September 2026. Of the 45 tools with a full year of data, 37 lost traffic and the median tool lost 43%.

The losses were not even. Semrush grew 5%, and its share of all the traffic in this set rose from 18.8% to 27.7%. Social listening tools lost three quarters of theirs.

The headline numbers

• 15.54 million to 11.04 million. Combined estimated US Google visits a month, September 2025 to September 2026. Down 29%.
• 37 of 45. Tools with a year of history that lost estimated traffic. Eight gained.
• 57.5%. The share going to the top three (Semrush, Similarweb, Ahrefs) in September 2026. A year earlier the top three took 45.6%.
• After March. The total was still 15.88 million in March 2026. Nearly all of the fall came in the six months after.
• 2.00 million to 1.12 million. Keywords these 46 sites rank for, down 44%. 43 of the 46 rank for fewer.
• 1. Estimated monthly visits to tryfigo.com, our own site. More on that below.

Competitive intelligence tools ranked by estimated traffic

We use "competitive intelligence tools" broadly here: anything marketers use to research competitors, from SEO suites to ad spy tools. "Now" is the live estimate on 4 October 2026. The change column compares the September 2025 and September 2026 monthly figures.

SEO suites

Semrush is the only one of the eight that grew. Ahrefs lost 970,000 estimated visits a month, the largest fall in the study. iSpionage faded from 413 visits in September 2025 to zero by January 2026. If you are weighing them on cost, Semrush pricing has the current plans and the best Semrush alternatives compares the rest.

Traffic and market data

Social media management and analytics

All four fell. Hootsuite and Sprout Social alone lost 1.77 million estimated visits a month between them.

Competitive intelligence platforms

Owler grew 167% and is one of only three sites in the study ranking for more keywords than a year ago. Crayon's 80% fall needs care: its monthly estimate swung between 8,500 and 44,100 during the year, so the answer depends on which months you compare. Search traffic says little about what these platforms do for a sales team; our roundup of competitive intelligence software covers that.

Social listening and media monitoring

Every tool in this category lost more than 60%. No other category lost more than 52% overall.

Page change monitoring

The only category with a year of history that grew, and only because of two sites. PageCrawl went from 589 estimated visits to 23,500. The other four fell.

Rank trackers, price monitors, ad spy tools and Figo

Biggest gainers and losers

Only tools with at least 1,000 estimated visits in September 2025, so a tiny base cannot produce a silly percentage.

In raw visits the biggest losers are the biggest sites: Ahrefs (970,000 a month fewer), Hootsuite (914,000), Sprout Social (855,000), CB Insights (482,000) and Exploding Topics (436,000).

What the pattern suggests

The fall is too broad to be any one company's SEO problem. When 37 of 45 unrelated sites drop in the same year, the cause is usually upstream: fewer searches, fewer clicks per search, or a change in how the estimate is calculated. All three are probably in play.

Sites you use held up better than sites you read. The gainers mostly sell a lookup or a job: Owler's company profiles, Similarweb's traffic pages, Visualping's and PageCrawl's page watchers, Semrush's keyword tools. A summary on the results page cannot do those for you. The steepest losses are in social listening and social media management. Our guess, which this data cannot confirm, is that more of those sites' traffic came from articles answering general marketing questions. We did not pull page-level data, so treat this as a reading of the pattern, not a measurement.

The timing fits AI Overviews, but timing is not proof. The fall came after March 2026. Around then, US searches for "ai overviews" itself hit 201,000 in April 2026, against 33,100 in August 2025. Searches for "competitor analysis" fell 52% on a 12-month average (the search demand study has the full keyword tables). Both fit the idea that more questions now get answered on the results page, which our explainer on AI Overviews covers. Neither proves it.

Some of the drop may be the measurement. Between March and April 2026, the keywords recorded for these sites fell 22% in one month, and 42 of the 46 lost keywords that month. Unrelated companies do not lose a fifth of their rankings in the same four weeks by coincidence. Either Google's results changed for everyone at once or the keyword database behind the estimate did. This data cannot tell which. Semrush's own estimate spiked to 5.96 million in April 2026 and fell 49% by September, a shape that looks more like a model adjusting than a business changing.

Where Figo sits

Ours, so judge accordingly. On 4 October 2026 tryfigo.com had an estimated 1 visit a month from US Google, ranked for 6 keywords and had none in the top 10. The site is new, with no ranking history in this data before September 2026. We include it because a study that hides its publisher's own zero is not worth trusting, and because it is the baseline everything after is measured against.

Figo records the same kind of figure, keyword positions and estimated organic traffic, for each competitor you track, once a week, alongside their ads, pages and reviews. If you only need a one-off comparison like this, you do not need Figo: checking a competitor's website traffic with free tools is enough.

How we got these numbers

• Source: DataForSEO Labs, Google United States, English. Live figures from its domain overview; monthly history from its historical overview. Pulled on 4 October 2026.
• Sample: 46 domains in 10 categories, chosen by us as the tools marketers most often use or compare for competitor research. The categories are ours.
• Estimated visits: for every keyword a site ranks for, the keyword's monthly search volume multiplied by the expected click rate for its position, summed. A modelled number, not real visits.
• Ranking keywords: how many keywords the site ranks for in the tracked Google results.
• Year-on-year: the September 2025 and September 2026 monthly snapshots. The "now" column is the newer live figure, so the two can disagree: Talkwalker shows 69,800 in the September snapshot and 30,000 now.

1. Estimates, not visits. They come from a keyword model. They are fine for comparing sites and spotting direction, and wrong to quote as real traffic. How accurate traffic estimates are explains why.
2. The vendor's model moves everything at once. A change to the keyword database or the click curve shifts every site in the same month, as April 2026 appears to show.
3. Small sites are noisy. A few keywords moving a few positions can double or halve a small site's estimate. PageCrawl's +3,893% starts from 589.
4. Year-on-year compares single months. One odd month at either end distorts it, as Crayon shows.
5. US Google only, branded searches included. Tools with mostly non-US audiences look smaller than they are, and a tool's own name searches (customers logging in) count as traffic.

The same caveats apply to the estimates in Figo's own reports; where Figo's data comes from marks which numbers are measured and which are modelled.