What is the difference between Semrush Traffic Analytics and Google Analytics?

The central difference between our service and Google Analytics is that Google Analytics is an internal service for studying your own website, while Semrush is an external service for studying another company’s website.

Since you can’t get into another site’s internal statistics, we offer the next best thing.

Traffic Analytics is intended for market research and competitive analysis—you’ll never get to look inside the Google Analytics of your top competitors, partners, media outlets or prospects—but our tools and reports offer the closest look you can get.

How Semrush Traffic Analytics gathers data:

Semrush Traffic Analytics is based on petabytes of clickstream data that comes from multiple proprietary and 3rd party data sources, Semrush’s proprietary AI and machine learning algorithms, and Big Data technologies.

The data is accumulated and approximated from the user behavior of over 200 million real internet users and over a hundred different apps and browser extensions. We offer our "estimated accuracy" metric at the top of the report so you can gauge how accurate the reported numbers are.

Go to Traffic Analytics

How Google Analytics gathers data:

Google Analytics, on the other hand, gathers data directly from your website through a custom JavaScript tracking code that you as the webmaster or site owner place within the code of your site.

If you only want to analyze your own website traffic without comparing it with others, we recommend referring to your own Google Analytics.

There might be discrepancies in traffic numbers between Traffic Analytics and Google Analytics due to the fact that they gather data differently. Please note that the tools are not interchangeable—they are used for different purposes.

All numbers in Semrush Traffic Analytics are perfectly comparable, meaning you can match two or more websites in the tool and see how their metrics differ from each other in %.