Ahrefs says I get 121 visits a month. Search Console says 2,630.
Ahrefs currently estimates AIToolsRecap's organic traffic at 121 visits a month. Google Search Console says 2,630 clicks in the last 28 days. It's off by more than 20×.
I mention it because before I built this I was checking incumbent directories in Ahrefs to work out whether the niche was worth entering. If I'd trusted those numbers I wouldn't have started. Those tools badly undercount newer sites, and if you're pre-launch and sizing up a market that way, you're probably reading a number that's wrong by an order of magnitude.
Real figures as of today: 4.89M Google impressions, 4,260 clicks, 314 ChatGPT citations, 127 Copilot, DR 30, 799 referring domains. Four months, $0 on ads or backlinks.
This is something I wish more founders talked about. Ahrefs, Semrush, and similar tools are useful for spotting trends, but I don't think they're reliable enough to judge an early-stage site's actual traffic. I've seen plenty of newer websites where Search Console tells a completely different story.
If you're validating an idea, I'd treat third-party estimates as one input, not the deciding factor. Otherwise, you risk walking away from a niche that might actually have a lot more opportunity than the tools suggest.
The biggest lesson: impressions alone can create false confidence.
One page received 395,000 impressions but only 161 clicks—a 0.04% CTR. Meanwhile, one comparison page received just 1,370 impressions but generated 88 clicks—a 6.4% CTR.
I’m now focusing less on publishing volume and more on decision-stage content: comparisons, alternatives, pricing, and “best tool for” pages.
Has anyone else experienced this difference between visibility and actual traffic?