What is the difference between Google Analytics and Semrush Traffic Analytics?
The central difference between Semrush and Google Analytics is that Google Analytics is an internal service for studying your own website, while Semrush is an external service for studying another company’s website.
Google Analytics vs Semrush
Since you can’t get into another site’s internal statistics, Semrush offer the next best thing.
Traffic Analytics is intended for market research and competitive analysis—you’ll never get to look inside the Google Analytics of your top competitors, partners, media outlets or prospects—but Semrush tools and reports offer the closest look you can get.
How Semrush Traffic Analytics gathers data:
Semrush Traffic Analytics is based on petabytes of clickstream data that comes from multiple proprietary and 3rd party data sources, Semrush’s proprietary AI and machine learning algorithms, and Big Data technologies.
The data is accumulated and approximated from the user behavior of over 200 million real internet users and over a hundred different apps and browser extensions. Semrush offers their "estimated accuracy" metric at the top of the report so you can gauge how accurate the reported numbers are.
How Google Analytics gathers data:
Google Analytics, on the other hand, gathers data directly from your website through a custom JavaScript tracking code that you as the webmaster or site owner place within the code of your site.
If you only want to analyze your own website traffic without comparing it with others, Semrush recommends referring to your own Google Analytics.
There might be discrepancies in traffic numbers between Traffic Analytics and Google Analytics due to the fact that they gather data differently. Please note that the tools are not interchangeable—they are used for different purposes.
All numbers in Semrush Traffic Analytics are perfectly comparable, meaning you can match two or more websites in the tool and see how their metrics differ from each other in %.
Looking Forward
As we continue through 2025, web development practices will further evolve, embracing new technologies while maintaining a strong foundation in performance, accessibility, and user experience. Staying updated with these trends and best practices is crucial for developers looking to build modern, scalable web applications.
