Marketing Channels, also known as the sources of traffic, represent the initial point from which a visitor arrives at a website. Similarweb provides a comprehensive view of these channels, allowing you to discover where a website's traffic is coming from and benchmark performance against competitors.
Why Marketing Channels Matter?
The Marketing Channels report allows you to identify which channels truly move the needle, identify competitors’ growth drivers, and focus on the channels that bring results. More specifically, it can help you:
- Evaluate your website's digital performance by analyzing web traffic volume and engagement metrics across marketing channels
- Showcase opportunities to grow your traffic share across a competitive set
- Find out where your competitors are reliant on for traffic, so you know which sources drive visits to their sites
- Plan and prioritize marketing resources by analyzing the leading channels generating traffic for your competitors and industry leaders
- Get an overview of brand awareness by looking at direct and organic traffic sources.
- View geographical market shares by setting the country filter to focus your analysis on desired markets
- Reveal the quantity and quality of traffic sent to a site(s) per traffic source
- Discover a clearer view of modern traffic sources: from Gen AI to Paid and Organic Social Sources
- Roughly gauge how much competitor brands are spending on their own digital marketing efforts by analyzing their traffic from paid search, display ads, and others
Let’s dive into how to make the most of Marketing Channels.
Marketing Channels Overview
With the Channels Overview graph, you can identify the leading channels generating traffic to your website and your competitors. Compare traffic volumes to identify channels where you are losing out to the competition and uncover opportunities to grow your traffic.
What channels are included in the Marketing Channels report?
- Direct: Traffic from users who type a URL into their browser, use a bookmark, or click a link outside the browser that doesn't pass a referrer (e.g., messaging apps)
- Organic Search: Unpaid clicks from search engine results. This represents your SEO performance
- Paid Search: Clicks from search engine advertisements, including sponsored links and Product Listing Ads
- Gen AI: A brand new channel tracking traffic and citations from AI chatbot platforms such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity
- Social Organic: Unpaid traffic from social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, or Reddit
- Social Paid: Traffic from paid advertisements on social media platforms, identified through technical markers like Click IDs and UTM tags
- Referrals: Traffic from links on other websites, excluding search engines and social
- Affiliates: A new, distinct channel for traffic coming from partners earning commissions through performance-based arrangements
- Display Ads: Traffic from visual banner ads or programmatic advertisements hosted on third-party domains
- Email: Traffic sent from web-based email clients like Gmail or Outlook
Note: We are only able to categorize email traffic when it comes from the URL, such as the above examples. If it comes from a separate application, it is bucketed under Direct traffic. In addition, Marketing Channels only tracks web traffic and doesn’t include app traffic.
Check out our blog that goes into more detail about each marketing channel.
Note: The data includes a breakdown of each channel's traffic visits, which are truncated to 10,000 results. When you analyze data over a long period of time for a website(s) with a lot of different traffic sources, a minor discrepancy in traffic may be observed (in these instances, it's smaller than 0.05%, much less than half a percent).
Tip: In addition to your direct competitors, you can also compare a site to an industry. In the example below, you can see Uniqlo.com compared to the fashion and apparel industry. While Uniqlo is outperforming the industry when it comes to organic search, they can see the industry is more dependent on paid search and affiliate traffic, meaning Uniqlo can be quite happy with their awareness driving organic traffic to the site, with the potential to increase paid traffic budgets and get even more traffic.
Tip: When analyzing a single domain, you can also quickly compare it to the industry benchmark. Simply choose a relevant benchmark.
Heatmap Report: Growth Drivers and Marketing Focus Changes
This report helps you visualize the changes in traffic from each marketing channel across an entire competitive set. Both of these charts focus on year-over-year growth.
With the Growth Drivers chart, you'll see the actual change in visits, including a total change (from all channels) along the top row. This is a great way to monitor the concrete impact a channel is having on each site being analyzed, and answer the real-world impact. For example, in the screenshot below, Nike sees an almost 9M increase from Display traffic in just 3 months. Interestingly, their competition is either losing traffic via these channels or growing moderately.
Important: the heatmap view is only available when you compare at least 2 sites (i.e., it won’t be visible when analyzing a single domain).
Meanwhile, the Marketing Focus chart provides these changes in percentages. Seeing a percentage change is crucial to understanding the efficiency or momentum each of the channels is having on each of the sites in analysis. It guides in assessing traffic performance for each site.
For example, looking at the screenshot below, seeing that Adidas Gen AI traffic is 311% up, at a much higher rate than their competitors, meaning they are able to capture more demand from a growing number of people searching for answers and content via LLMs.
Channel Traffic
In the Channel Traffic chart, you can analyze the share of visitor traffic per channel and see the trends and changes over time.
When you compare two or more sites you can easily see the changes for each channel, by % or total number of visits.
Traffic Share gives you an estimated percentage of traffic sent to each of the analyzed domains (or pages) compared to the total website's traffic.
Daily, weekly, and monthly granularity is also available, enabling real-time detection of trends and campaign impacts.
You can also export the data via Excel.
Note: when analyzing a single site/domain, the view looks a bit different
Period over Period Comparisons
All Marketing Channels graphs are supported with Period over Period analysis.
This will allow you to see period-over-period growth/decline of your competitor’s traffic acquisition channels in terms of a percentage. Identify which player is growing in which channel, and gain insight into where there has been more resources or investment made in a particular channel by those competitors.
You will be able to select the desired period to compare against based on your requirements: month over month, quarter over quarter, specific periods, or year over year.
The period-over-period analysis allows you to:
- See changes in average growth per channel for an industry
- Show traffic sources that are new for the latest period, traffic sources that are no longer being leveraged, traffic sources that have grown/dropped but are still sending traffic for both periods
- See growth/decline in absolute numbers and in growth % for engagement metrics per channel
Traffic Sources
In Traffic Sources, you can see distinct sources driving traffic to your site. Key metrics & insights:
- Traffic Source: Source that drove traffic to the analyzed website.
- Source Type: Type of source that sent traffic (includes direct mail, referrals, social networks, search engines, and display ads).
- Group Traffic Share: Percentage of traffic sent to the category.
- Group Share Split: Percentage breakdown of traffic sent to the analyzed websites.
- Category: Category best describing the traffic source domain, such as search engines, fashion, and apparel, etc.
How to find Marketing Channels?
There are 3 areas where Web Intelligence users can leverage Marketing Channels insights:
- To view the traffic performance of up to 5 websites, simply go to the Website Analysis module. Then, under “Traffic”, you’ll see the Marketing Channels page. To compare your analysis with other websites or your competitors:
- Click +Add a website to compare, to add up to four additional sites
- Use the filters in the upper right to set the time period and country that you would like to analyze.
- Try it now!
- You can even use Marketing Channels on the Market Analysis section, which gives you a more strategic view of traffic Volumes by source and traffic volume over time by channel, at the industry level
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Marketing Channels Benchmark report: Easily benchmark your marketing channels against competitors with a ready-made report that provides insights into their performance. This report helps you to
- Quickly measure the share of traffic by channel and competitor
- Identify which competitors dominate each channel
- Track weekly changes with ease
- Leverage our best marketing channels data, including the Gen AI channel
You can access the Marketing Channels Benchmark report via the homepage. Simply access one of your “Projects”, click “Benchmark Report, and choose “Channels.
New channels, more granularity, greater precision in channel classification
In April 2026, Similarweb rolled out a significant upgrade to its web dataset, specifically impacting Marketing Channels with enhanced precision and new capabilities. This update introduces a more accurate representation of real-world user behavior and search dynamics
A 37-month data rerun has been applied to provide a consistent historical baseline using the new methodology. You can read more about it here
To learn more, you can watch this webinar or read more here
FAQs
What changed in the Marketing Channels data and why now?
The web has evolved, and so has our measurement. We upgraded our methodology to use a larger, higher-quality data set across desktop and mobile, combined with improved classification models. This gives a more accurate view of how traffic reaches websites.
What are the main benefits of the upgraded version of Marketing Channels?
- More accurate data: Better attribution of visits to the right channels
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New channels:
- Gen AI (e.g., ChatGPT, Perplexity)
- Social Paid vs. Social Organic
- Affiliates
- All Traffic view: Unified desktop + mobile web analysis
Why move to “All Traffic”?
It removes device bias and reflects real user behavior across devices. You still get device-level data where needed, but the default view now shows total performance. The transition happens in key areas of the platform, while we’re still keeping device granularity. Hence, Device-level granularity will remain available in SEO Intelligence, where it is critical to track search and clicks (e.g., Keyword Research, Rank Tracker, and more). In addition, we’re keeping device granularity available via API. Read the full details here
Why do my channel shares look different?
We now detect more signals than before. Since channels make up 100% of traffic, better attribution shifts the overall distribution, making it more accurate.
Does this affect my previous reports?
No. Past insights were based on the best data available at the time. This update is a one-time recalibration that improves accuracy moving forward. On 25th April 2026, numbers and historic data change to support the Marketing Channels upgrade and impacted metrics: Some metrics will have 37 months of history recalculated (excluding Website Ranking - 3 months rerun).
Can I trust the new data?
Yes. The new model has been validated against first-party data across millions of sites and is significantly more precise overall.
What should I do next?
- Review competitor channel mix
- Explore new channels like Generative AI and Affiliates
- Reassess your traffic strategy based on the updated data
Where can I see the updated Marketing Channels data?
In the Marketing Channels report across:
- Website Analysis
- Market Analysis
- Benchmark Reports (via Projects)
Outside of Marketing Channels, other impacted metrics across platform pages (e.g., Search, Referrals, etc). See the full list of changes here.
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