Organic traffic

Organic traffic means visits that come from unpaid listings in search engines. It excludes paid ads, social media, email and direct visits. In analytics, it's usually reported as the organic search channel.

For your own site, Google Analytics and Google Search Console give you real numbers. For someone else's site, you only get estimates from tools that model traffic from keyword rankings. These can be far off, particularly for small sites or ones that get traffic from outside search. Treat them as a guide to scale.

Practical point: when you vet a site for a link, check that its estimated traffic is steady or growing and that it ranks for terms related to its topic. A sharp drop can signal a penalty or a changed site. Look at traffic by country if the audience matters to you.

LinkHatch sites must clear a traffic floor, and each receipt records the site's traffic.