When someone searches for how to check website traffic for free, they usually imagine a single dashboard with all the visits. The reality, after years of measuring client sites and our own projects, is that no single free source tells the full story on its own. What works is combining two or three and knowing what to ask each one.
The case of the blog that was losing visits without knowing it
A content project about gardening detected a 30% drop in sessions over three weeks. The first reaction was to check Google Analytics 4, but the decline didn’t show up there: the problem was in the Search Console performance report, where impressions for a key URL had plummeted after a template change. Analytics showed the drop as a symptom; Search Console explained the cause. Without cross-referencing both free tools, the diagnosis would have been blind.
That’s a practical lesson: Analytics measures behavior within the site, Search Console measures visibility before the click. Neither replaces the other.
Comparing a domain with the competition without paying
Tools like SimilarWeb offer a free version with estimates of monthly visits. They’re useful for a rough orientation, not for making investment decisions. On one occasion I compared a local ecommerce site with a regional competitor and the difference seemed enormous; when we cross-checked with the client’s own Search Console data, we discovered that the free estimate was inflating the rival’s traffic by including third-party subdomains. The lesson: free third-party figures are statistical approximations, not real measurements, and it’s best to treat them as a signal of magnitude, never as an exact figure.
When traffic isn’t what it seems: bots and filters
A common mistake when checking traffic for free is not reviewing the filtering of internal traffic and bots. I’ve seen dashboards with session spikes coming from a single city that turned out to be monitoring tools. Enabling the spam filter and excluding your own IPs in GA4 completely changes the reading. If you don’t do this, any conclusion about “real traffic” is contaminated.
What to ask each free source
Google Analytics 4
It answers: what users do, where they come from, which pages convert. Important limitation: without prior configuration of events and conversions, the standard reports say little. It’s not useful for auditing the competition.
Google Search Console
It answers: which queries generate impressions, what CTR they have, which pages are losing positions. It only covers verified properties, that is, your own domains or others’ domains that you’ve been able to verify. It doesn’t show paid or social media traffic.
Estimation tools (SimilarWeb, limited version of Semrush)
They answer: approximately how much traffic a third-party domain has and which channels it comes from. Their weak point is reliability: according to the documentation of these platforms, their models combine user panels, click data, and extrapolations, so the margin of error can be significant on small sites.
What doesn’t work and is worth admitting
There is no free and reliable way to know the exact traffic of a site that isn’t yours. Any tool that promises exact figures for third-party domains is overselling precision. Checking only once doesn’t work either: traffic is seasonal and a single snapshot is misleading. Comparing equivalent periods (month against the same month of the previous year) avoids false conclusions.
For your own projects, the minimum reasonable combination is Search Console plus Analytics with filters configured. To analyze competition, use free estimates as hypotheses and validate with your own data when you can. That mix of skepticism and method is what separates a useful check from a poorly founded decision.