Check website traffic and revenue: the second number is a guess on a guess

Every so often a screenshot goes round claiming some site earns a fat monthly income from millions of visits, sourced to a tool that will check website traffic and revenue for any domain. Both numbers are models. The second one is a model built on top of the first. Before you quote-tweet it, here is what you are looking at.

The traffic half is already a guess

Nobody outside a company can read its analytics. Tools that report a rival's traffic rebuild it, most commonly from Google rankings:

• find the keywords the site ranks for and its position on each
• look up how many people search each keyword a month
• multiply by the click share a result in that position typically gets
• add it all up

Run one keyword through it: third place on a phrase searched 10,000 times a month, at roughly a 10% click share, becomes 1,000 visits. Now do that for thousands of keywords, each with a slightly wrong position, an averaged volume and a click curve that pretends AI Overviews and ads do not exist. The total is a reasonable size class. It is not a visitor count.

It also only covers organic Google. Direct visits, social, email, newsletters and AI assistant referrals are invisible to it, and branded searches tend to come out low. A loud brand with a big newsletter can look small.

The revenue half is a guess on a guess

A "revenue" or "earnings" figure for someone else's site has to start from modeled visits and then assume what each visit is worth. Whatever error the traffic carried, the revenue inherits, and then adds an assumption about how the site makes money. A SaaS company, a news site and an affiliate blog with identical traffic make wildly different amounts.

There is one money figure in this space that does mean something, and it is often misread. Some tools show the ad value of a site's organic traffic: what it would cost to buy the same visits as Google Ads clicks. seogeoaeo.ai's Domain Overview is one of them, and its own help text is blunt that this shows what the site's rankings are worth, not what the site spends. Someone will still screenshot it as revenue.

What you can actually check

If you want a defensible read on a rival, ask questions that the data can answer.

How big is their search presence? Domain Overview returns ranking keyword counts split into first place, positions 2 to 3, 4 to 10 and below, plus estimated monthly Google visits, for one of 20 countries. 50 credits a run.

Do they buy traffic? The same report lists the keywords the site pays for and an estimated monthly ad spend. Still an estimate, but at least it is an estimate of spending, not of income.

Are they well known? Referring sites, link rank from 0 to 1,000, average spam score and nofollow share. A site with weak search numbers and strong links probably gets its traffic somewhere a checker cannot see.

Is it growing? Run the same domain again in a few months, same tool, same country. Direction is more reliable than size.

How to sanity-check any screenshot

Run your own site through the same tool, in the same country, on the same day. Compare the result with your real Search Console clicks. If the tool says 4,000 and you know it is 6,000, you now know how far off it runs for sites like yours. Most people sharing the screenshot never did this.

Also check whether the screenshot mixes tools. Traffic from one vendor against traffic from another is two models arguing, not two websites competing.

The short version

The traffic figure is a modeled estimate of organic Google visits. The revenue figure is a second model on top. The ad value is what rankings would cost to buy, not what anyone earns. For a clean read on search size, ads and links in one report, seogeoaeo.ai's Domain Overview is what we would use, with plans from $29 a month for 2,000 credits on the pricing page.

If you want a stored traffic history for a site without rerunning anything, a subscription suite such as Ahrefs keeps traffic graphs over time. That still will not tell you anyone's revenue.