Ahrefs Halves Organic Traffic Estimates in New Update

If, like me, you logged into Ahrefs today to check or highlight general organic traffic progress, you may have had a WTF moment when you saw a much lower number than you were expecting.

The reason it’s now much lower (almost exactly 50% based on the sites I’ve checked) is that they’ve changed how they calculate organic traffic, opting for a much more conservative estimate + ignoring a large portion of spam keywords.

The new values look to be a lot closer to the data in Google Search Console than they were previously (although from what I can tell they’re still out by roughly 15%), so this is likely an overall positive move towards a more accurate reflection of traffic.

They may be using their GSC connectors to crowd-source this more accurate data.

So don’t be alarmed, your site isn’t penalised, it’s just a change in the way Ahrefs estimate traffic.