Business Lines

Business Lines allow you to benchmark the digital performance of specific sections of a website, focused on distinct business lines such as (for example): Women’s Clothing, Jewelry, or Home Goods. This feature provides more granular, accurate, and actionable competitive intelligence by isolating relevant parts of a competitor's business for analysis.

Try Business Lines!

The Value of Business Lines

Business Lines lets you benchmark your exact line of business with precision, so you can spot gaps, understand who's winning, and take action to grow. Gain deeper insight into competitors' positioning, uncover their strengths and weaknesses, and see exactly where they’re driving growth. Now you’ll be able to:

• Benchmark performance at the line-of-business level
• Discover category-specific competitors and market dynamics
• Track traffic share and growth across specific business units
• Make data-driven strategic decisions with advanced insights

Who They’re For

Your entire marketing, research, and analytics teams can benefit from using it:

• Digital Marketing Teams can use it to compare category-level performance to target campaigns more effectively.
• BI Analysts can use it to identify underserved lines of business and track category shifts over time.
• Brand and Product Managers can monitor how your specific product lines stack up against competitors.

Feature Location and Setup 

Under the Website Research module, select Website Analysis. Input your site and up to four competitors, and then go to the Website Content report. Along with the tabs of Folders, Pages, and Subdomains, you will see Business Lines. This unified view helps you identify top-performing areas and uncover hidden opportunities faster.

Note that you can add other websites, but below will provide you an analysis for each site individually.

How to Use Business Lines

Total Visits by Business Line

The first report you’ll see highlights for you which business line is driving the most traffic to the selected website. Bear in mind that you can have up to 5 business lines selected. The percentage is giving you the share out of all the traffic being driven to the website. This is a fantastic way to understand which line of business is driving the most success to a company. When analyzing a competitor, this will provide you insight into where you might be lagging, or it could help your product management teams with new ways to diversify your business.

Visits Over Time by Business Line

With this report, you can see how the traffic from each business line changes over time. This is useful to find product lines on the rise under a competitor site, or see if any business lines of yours are dropping in popularity. 

Summary of Visits by Business Line

See the total distribution of traffic by business line to the selected site. This displays a holistic view of which products or brands the website is reliant on for traffic.  

Compare Mode

Benchmark competitors' sites side by side at the business-line level for a quick snapshot of granular traffic share. This allows you to easily answer questions like:

• Who’s leading in key business lines?
• Who’s gaining or losing traffic Month on Month focus areas?
• Where am I underrepresented?
• Is growth driven by one player or a broader trend?
• Which business lines need more attention?

FAQs

What is the definition of a Business Lines?

A business line represents a segment of a site where the same type of product or service is being sold.

How did you classify URLs in each Business Lines?

We use AI models to understand the content and context of each URL. The model compares them to different Business Lines and assigns each URL to the one it best matches, or none.

Are all URLs of a site classified into a Business Line?

No, not all URLs are classified into a Business Line. For example, homepages, “my account” pages, customer service etc. are not considered as Business Lines.

Why is the sum of visits of each business line bigger than the site’s visits for the same time period?

A visitor can make one visit to a site but go to different sections of this site. For example, on zara.com, a visitor can both visit the Women’s Clothing segment as well as the Jewelry segment. This will count as one visit to Women’s Clothing and one visit to Jewelry. Hence why the sum of visits to the Business Lines can be higher than the site visits.

Why is the sum of visits of each business line smaller than the site’s visits for the same time period?

There are some sections or pages of a website that are not classified within a Business Line. Therefore, those visits wouldn’t be included when totaling the visits to all Business Lines, but they would still count toward the website’s total visits.

How are  Business Lines chosen? Are they consistent across sites?
Business Lines are consistent across sites within the same vertical (e.g. all retail sites) to ensure comparability, but may vary between verticals, such as travel and finance.

They are defined by the Similarweb team to reflect the most common business lines in each vertical. The taxonomy follows frameworks used in Sales Intelligence (to classify websites) and Demand Analysis (to group keywords into Topics).

Are all URLs of a site classified into Business Lines?

No, not all URLs are included in Business Line segments. We only classify pages that reflect clear commercial or marketing intent related to a specific product or service. General-purpose pages like the homepage or customer support are excluded.

Is the feature available across all country filters?

Yes, you can use any country filter; so if a site is an international one, the insights will be available for any country. Adding more sites, including ones that might not have a presence in the US, is on our roadmap.

Can I see the URLs under each Business Line?

No, we do not provide visibility into the urls that are under each Business Line Segment. We are considering this feature for future developments. In the meantime, if you are interested in page-level insights (at the site level, not per Business LIne), we recommend using Popular pages.

Are Business Lines editable?

No.

Do you plan to add support for PoP/YoY mode?

Yes, we plan to support both period-over-period (PoP) and year-over-year (YoY) analysis. Business Lines data currently includes 13 months of historical data, and this range will soon be extended, which will make these comparison modes possible later on.

Can I compare business lines across sites?

Yes, you can use Compare Mode to view sites side-by-side across all their business lines. This allows you to get traffic share per site on different Business Lines - and answer questions like:

• Who wins in each business line?
• Where are there underserved business lines?
• Which competitor captures growth from this business line?