Semrush’s New Traffic Insights Explains Changes In Competitor Traffic Performance
New AI-powered Traffic Insights in Traffic Analytics help teams identify competitor traffic spikes and drops, understand the drivers, and act faster.
June 11, 2026
Today we’ve revamped and improved the way we calculate our Authority Score. Now, we believe it will be more accurate in measuring overall website quality and trustworthiness.
Now, when you check AS for any website, you’ll be able to see exactly why the site has its score, based on three main facets of authority:
Now, when you check AS for any website, you’ll be able to see exactly why the site has its score, based on three main facets of authority:
- Link Power - the total number and quality of referring domains linking to the site
- Organic Traffic - the domain’s estimated monthly organic search traffic, based on Semrush data
- Natural Profile - the quality of the domain’s links in relation to a lack of common spam factors and signs of link manipulation
Here’s what it looks like now:
When you hover over one of these three factors, you can see more details about why the domain has a certain score.
Here’s the full list of factors that play into the final calculation:
Here’s the full list of factors that play into the final calculation:
- Quality of backlink profile (similar to PageRank calculation)
- Organic traffic
- Spam factors (for Natural Profile)
- Absence from all SERPs
- Unnaturally high percentage of follow domains in link profile
- Presence of another domain with an identical backlink profile
- Too many referring domains with the same IP address
- Too many referring domains with the same IP network
- Low organic traffic to links ratio
This score can be found in the following Semrush tools and reports:
- Domain Overview
- Backlink Analytics
- Backlink Gap
- Bulk Backlink Analysis
- Backlink Audit
- Link Building Tool
For more information on Authority Score, check out the following links:
About Semrush
Semrush is a leading online visibility management SaaS platform that enables businesses globally to run search engine optimization, pay-per-click, content, social media and competitive research campaigns and get measurable results from online marketing. Semrush offers insights and solutions for companies to build, manage, and measure campaigns across various marketing channels. Semrush, with over 94,000 paying customers, is headquartered in Boston and has offices in Philadelphia, Trevose, Austin, Dallas, Amsterdam, Barcelona, Belgrade, Berlin, Limassol, Prague, Warsaw, and Yerevan.
