See any company's web traffic in seconds.

How to find out how much traffic any website gets, where it comes from, and what's actually working for them. With a free tool, no technical skills, and about ten minutes of setup.

By Will Mulholland · 8 min read

Most strategy and growth problems come down to one question: how much traffic, and where does it come from? Once you can answer that for any website in seconds, you start seeing the internet differently. You land on a competitor, a prospect, a potential partner, and you can read their whole growth story off a sidebar.

Fair warning: it's addictive. You'll start checking the traffic on every site you visit.

Install the SimilarWeb Chrome extension, land on any website, and click the icon. A sidebar opens with the site's traffic at a glance, no leaving the page. Try it on the New York Times and read it top to bottom:

• Monthly visits. The NYT pulls 640 to 685 million a month. Calibrate your gut: anything over a million a month is doing well in the startup world.
• Bounce rate. The share who hit one page and leave. 55% here, but paired with 3+ pages per visit it tells you a loyal cohort reads 10 to 15 pages and drags the average up.
• Pages per visit and average visit duration. Content sites run long (four minutes here), a SaaS marketing site runs short. The shape tells you the kind of business.

Scroll the sidebar and you get the keywords driving search traffic, with the cost-per-click next to each. This is the part people don't expect the free tool to do, and it's where the story is.

Look at the NYT's top five keywords: four of them are games. Wordle, Connections, Strands, Mini Crossword. In one glance you've learned something real about where their search traffic actually comes from, not the headline-news brand you assumed. The cost-per-click tells you how competitive and commercially valuable each term is.

Keep scrolling for geography and traffic sources. This is the bit that changes how you read a business.

• Direct is people typing the URL or using a bookmark. A high share usually means a strong brand (with a pinch of salt: blocked tracking also lands here).
• Search is organic plus those keywords you just saw.
• Social, email, referrals (backlinks from other sites) and display (programmatic ads). The mix is their playbook. If a competitor gets 40% from email, that's a signal to go sign up and reverse-engineer their sequence.

Open the SimilarWeb platform and you can compare sites side by side. Put in Nike and Adidas and look at demographics and audience overlap.

Age and gender splits, and the killer one: audience overlap. 16% of Adidas visitors also browse Nike, but only 4% the other way, and Adidas's top "also visited" site is literally Nike.com. In two minutes you've built an evidence-backed case that Nike has the more loyal audience. That's the kind of line that wins an internal argument.

In the platform's search and landing-pages views, you can see which specific pages and subfolders pull the most traffic for a site. Sort by clicks and their priorities show up: a sale page they're pushing, a product launch, the jobs page, a sub-brand. You're reading their marketing roadmap off their own traffic.

Drop to the daily view of traffic over time and the spikes jump out. Take Apple: there's a clear jump on June 10.

Search "Apple June 10" and you find their developer conference. Now you can tie events to traffic, and even estimate the incremental visits a launch or a campaign drove. Do this on your own launches and you've got a measurement habit most teams never build.

Where this actually pays off

It looks like an SEO trick. It's much broader than that. A few ways to use it the moment you've got it: