Traffic estimates from popular SEO tools may be wrong now
Several well known SEOs say the numbers in Ahrefs and Semrush do not match Google's own click data right now.
The traffic numbers in Ahrefs, a paid tool that guesses how much Google traffic a website gets, are showing spikes and drops that do not appear in Google Search Console, the free Google report that shows your real clicks.
Marie Haynes posted a chart showing a sharp spike in Ahrefs that Search Console did not show and asked what was happening. Lily Ray replied that she had been seeing the same thing across a lot of accounts, and asked Ahrefs if it came from the new organic traffic calculations. Glenn Gabe said the change to adaptive traffic had changed visibility drastically for some sites right on that date, and that Ahrefs is aware and looking into it.
It is not just Ahrefs
Marie Haynes then opened Ahrefs to look at estimates for a recipe site that had reached out to her, and found a decline starting Aug 25 that she thinks is tied to the same change. She also said Semrush's graph for the site she shared was wildly wrong, not just in the absolute numbers but in showing big increases that Search Console did not show.
Glenn Gabe's advice is to compare three tools, Semrush, Ahrefs and Sistrix, and see whether they agree. If they do not line up, he says, do not trust any of them.
What this means for your site
These tools do not see your real traffic. They estimate it from rankings and search volume data, then draw a graph. That is fine for sizing up a competitor, but it was never a measurement of your own business. When the tool changes how it does the maths, your graph can move even though nothing on your site or in Google changed.
So if you logged into Ahrefs or Semrush in the past few days and saw a scary cliff or a suspicious jump, do not act on it yet. A drop in an estimate is not a drop in traffic.
Open Search Console, click Performance, set the date range to the last three months and look at total clicks. That is the number that came from Google. If clicks are flat there and the tool shows a crash, the tool is the thing that changed.
If Search Console does show a real fall, that is worth digging into, and it is separate from this. Either way, treat third party traffic graphs as a rough guide for the next while rather than evidence. Nobody has said yet how long it will take Ahrefs to sort out.
Do NOT trust recent spikes or drops there without checking Semrush and Sistrix.
My point is to check all three to see if they match. If not, don't trust any...