4 Similarweb Alternatives for Better Competitor Research

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Similarweb is powerful for digital intelligence. But like any tool, it has limitations.

You might want deeper insights into your competitors’ content strategies. Or need more reliable data for SEO planning. Or you’re simply looking for a more affordable solution.

I’ve spent months testing and researching the best Similarweb alternatives to see how they compare.

Four tools stand out as replacements.

This guide covers the top options for:

• Market trends
• Advanced SEO analysis
• Ad intelligence

Similarweb Limitations

While Similarweb excels at competitor intelligence, it might not fit everyone.

Here are some key limitations:

• Limited SEO and keyword research features: It lacks in-depth keyword rankings, SERP tracking, and backlink analysis, making it less effective for SEO professionals
• Limited keyword and backlink databases: Similarweb’s databases are smaller compared to its competitors like Semrush and Ahrefs
• Limited traffic source breakdown: It doesn’t show a detailed breakdown of where the website gets traffic from (e.g., organic search, social media, referrals, email, etc.)
• No granular audience demographics: Unlike some alternatives, Similarweb lacks detailed demographic breakdowns, such as income level or interests, that could help with audience targeting

Similarweb Alternatives at a Glance

Before I review each tool in detail, here’s a quick comparison of the best Similarweb alternatives:

	Best for	Standout Feature	Price Starts at
Semrush .Trends	Getting a detailed overview of competitors’ digital strategy	Comprehensive traffic source analysis and traffic journeys	$428.95 per month
Ahrefs Site Explorer	SEO and backlink analysis	In-depth keyword research, competitor content tracking	$129 per month
Serpstat	Budget-friendly SEO and PPC analysis	Keyword gap analysis, competitor PPC insights	$59 per month
Exploding Topics	Discovering emerging trends before they peak	AI-powered trend forecasting, 12+ months of predictions	Free plan available

Semrush .Trends

Best for marketers who want detailed competitor intelligence and market trends

Pricing: $139.95 (Semrush Pro plan) + $289 (.Trends add-on) = $428.95 per month

Semrush .Trends helps you spy on your competitors’ traffic and uncover hidden market opportunities.

It shows you how much traffic your competitors get, where that traffic comes from, and how engaged their visitors are.

Plus, you can use Market Explorer to spot emerging industry trends before your competition.

Why consider Semrush .Trends over Similarweb?

Let’s take a glance:

	Semrush	Similarweb
Primary Focus	Competitor intelligence and SEO analysis	Competitor intelligence and general market research
Traffic Source Breakdown	Detailed insights into specific channels	More generalized traffic source analysis
Keyword Database	26 billion keywords	5 billion keywords
Backlink Database	43 trillion backlinks	3.6 trillion backlinks
Who’s It for?	Digital marketers, SEO professionals, business strategists	Market researchers, businesses, or investors analyzing industries

Here are the key features included in .Trends:

Traffic Analytics

Traffic Analytics shows you your competitors’ traffic and where it comes from.

It also reveals useful SEO performance metrics, including:

• Total monthly traffic
• Top traffic sources
• Best-performing content
• Visitor engagement metrics

And you’ll get detailed insights into website traffic and visitor behavior that’ll help you refine your marketing strategy.

Let me show you how to use Traffic Analytics to spy on your competition.

Evaluate On-Site Engagement

Metrics like pages per visit, average visit duration, and bounce rate give you a snapshot of what happens when visitors land on the site.

Here’s what these metrics tell you about your competition:

A high bounce rate means most visitors leave without exploring other pages. This often happens when:

• The content doesn’t match what visitors were searching for
• Pages take too long to load
• The site isn’t mobile-friendly

On the flip side, when you see a high average visit duration and multiple pages per visit, it usually means:

• Their content keeps readers engaged
• They’ve built effective content funnels
• Their site navigation makes it easy to explore more content

Analyze Website Traffic Sources

Go to the “Traffic Journey” tab to understand where your competitors’ website visitors are coming from and which channels are driving the most traffic. For example, organic search, paid search, social, or referrals.

What do these metrics mean?

If you see most of their traffic comes from organic search (like in the screenshot above), you’ve struck gold. This usually means:

• They’ve built a solid foundation of SEO-optimized content
• They’re targeting the right keywords for your industry
• They’re not overly dependent on paid traffic

Pro tip: Pay special attention to competitors maintaining steady organic traffic growth. These are the ones whose SEO strategies you’ll want to study and adapt for your own site.

Map Out the Traffic Journey

The Traffic Journey report is like a GPS for your competitors’ visitors. It tracks their exact path before and after they land on the site.

Here’s what different traffic patterns reveal:

Pattern #1: When you see visitors flowing from Google → Your competitor → Stripe (or other payment processors), you’ve found a winning formula:

• Their content matches search intent perfectly (thanks to a solid SEO strategy)
• They’ve built a high-converting sales funnel
• They’re turning organic traffic into customers
  
  

Pattern #2: Notice lots of visitors bouncing back to Google.com? That’s a red flag indicating:

• The content isn’t delivering what visitors want
• There might be technical issues causing frustration
• You’ve spotted a gap you can fill with better content
  
  

Discover Top-Performing Pages

Navigate to the “Top Pages” tab to identify which pages on a competitor’s site drive the most traffic.

These top pages reveal what resonates most with their audience. This offers inspiration for your content strategy.

Let’s say you run a personal finance blog. You might discover that NerdWallet’s most-visited pages are their:

• Mortgage calculator tools
• Credit card comparison guides
• Student loan refinancing reviews

This tells you three things:

1. What type of content your audience want (interactive tools and comparison guides)
2. Which topics drive the most traffic (mortgages, credit cards, student loans)
3. Where to focus your content strategy for maximum impact

Market Explorer

Market Explorer helps you evaluate your market size and track up to 100 competitors at once.

The tool shows you who’s leading your industry, who’s growing fast, and detailed insights about your target audience’s demographics and behavior.

Here’s what you can do with Market Explorer:

Get a Market Summary

The Market Summary dashboard shows you a snapshot of your chosen industry.

Let’s say you’re just starting a business in the travel and tourism industry. This dashboard gives you the key metrics to evaluate the market and plan your strategy effectively:

Here’s what the key metrics on this dashboard mean:

• Market consolidation: Shows if a few big players dominate your market (high consolidation) or if it’s spread across many smaller sites (low consolidation)
• Market domains: How many active websites compete in your space
• Market traffic: How many monthly visitors the entire industry gets (and whether it’s growing or shrinking)
• Market traffic cost: How much you’d need to spend on ads to get the same traffic volume
• Market size: Two key numbers that matter:
  • Total Addressable Market (TAM): Your maximum possible audience size (example: “all online shoppers”)
  • Serviceable Available Market (SAM): The audience you can realistically reach (example: “online shoppers in your country”)

Analyze Audience Insights

The Audience section provides a detailed breakdown of your industry’s demographics, socioeconomic data, and behavioral trends.

These insights help you understand your target audience on a deeper level. This will allow you to tailor your marketing strategies to their specific needs and preferences.

Market Explorer even shows detailed audience socioeconomic data. For instance, their employment status, education level, and household income and size.

You’ll also see an overview of your audience’s additional interests. And what social media they use the most.

Strengths & Limitations

Strengths	Limitations
Understand where competitors get engagement from (organic search, social media, email, ads)	No mobile app intelligence
Tailored for SEO intelligence as it’s an all-in-one SEO platform

Further reading: Semrush Review: My #1 Choice for SEO Success

Ahrefs Site Explorer

Best for SEO professionals looking to analyze competitors’ organic traffic

Pricing: Starting at $129 per month

Ahrefs’ Site Explorer is an SEO-focused alternative to Similarweb. It provides detailed insights into competitors’ organic traffic and SEO strategies.

Why should you consider Ahrefs’ Site Explorer over Similarweb?

Here’s the high-level feature comparison:

	Ahrefs	Similarweb
Primary Focus	SEO and backlink analysis	Competitor intelligence and general market research
Traffic Source Breakdown	Organic and paid traffic insights	More generalized traffic source analysis
Keyword Database	28.7 billion keywords	5 billion keywords
Backlink Database	35 trillion backlinks	3.6 trillion backlinks
Who’s It for?	SEOs and content marketers analyzing SEO competition	Market researchers, businesses, or investors analyzing industries

Now, let’s review the key features Ahrefs Site Explorer offers.

View Your Competitors’ Top Pages

Site Explorer lets you identify the highest-value content on your competitor’s website. Plus, the top organic keywords driving that traffic.

Use these insights to replicate their success.

Let’s say you’re running a personal finance blog that competes with NerdWallet. You can analyze their top-performing pages to spot content opportunities.

In this example, the mortgage rates page is one of the most visited. This means that “current mortgage rates” is a high-demand topic worth covering on your website.

Review the Site Structures of Your Competitors

Ahrefs’ Site Structure feature shows a website’s architecture in a tree format with key SEO metrics across each section and subfolder.

This helps you analyze how competitors organize their content and which sections attract the most traffic.

For example, when you analyze one of your competitors, you can see:

• Which content categories drive the most organic traffic (e.g., reviews, mortgage guides, or financial calculators)
• The traffic performance of individual pages and subfolders
• How much organic and paid traffic each section receives, pinpointing opportunities for content optimization
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Strengths & Limitations

Strengths	Limitations
Helps identify high-value content opportunities	Less emphasis on broader market research
Have a look at competitors’ site architecture	No data on your competitors’ audience (age, location, interests, etc)

Further reading: 7 Best Ahrefs Alternatives (Free and Paid)

Serpstat

Best for SEOs and PPC advertisers looking for a budget-friendly tool for competitor analysis

Pricing: Starts at $59 per month; freemium version available

Serpstat is a budget-friendly SEO and PPC intelligence tool that analyzes competitors. It finds keyword opportunities and improves search rankings.

Why should you consider Serpstat over Similarweb?

Let’s take a glance:

	Serpstat	Similarweb
Primary Focus	SEO and PPC competitor analysis	Competitor intelligence and general market research
Keyword Database	7 billion keywords	5 billion keywords
Backlink Database	1.5 trillion backlinks	3.6 trillion backlinks
Who’s It for?	SEOs, content marketers, PPC advertisers	Market researchers, businesses or investors analyzing industries

Analyze Any Site’s SEO

Imagine you run a high-end salon in Philadelphia and want to compete with top-ranking salons like Salon OKO.

Serpstat’s Site Analysis > Competitors feature lets you compare multiple competitors side by side, showing common keywords and missing keywords.

But what do these metrics mean for you?

Common keywords are those you and your competitors rank for. This tells you:

Who ranks higher, and where you need to improve.

For example, if your competitor ranks #1 for a keyword while you’re at #10, you may need to update your content.

Missing keywords are keywords your competitors rank for that you don’t. This is an important insight because it can reveal:

• High-value content gaps and cover topics your competitors are already benefiting from
• New keyword opportunities, i.e., terms that are already proven to generate traffic in your industry
• Keywords that competitors dominate while your site doesn’t show up at all, likely because of indexing issues

Further reading: 8 Top Keyword Research Tools (Free & Paid)

Then, for each competitor’s domain, you can access detailed insights, such as:

• Domain overview report: Get a bird’s-eye view of their SEO performance, including total organic traffic, keyword rankings, and estimated traffic value
• Positions and keywords: See exactly which keywords they rank for, what position they’re in, and how these rankings change over time
• Top pages: Discover their highest-traffic content and the exact keywords driving visitors to each page (perfect for finding content gaps in your own strategy)
• Backlink profile: Analyze where their backlinks come from, which pages get the most links, and how their link profile grows over time
• Site audit: Peek under the hood at their technical SEO setup, including site structure, loading speed, and potential technical issues you can learn from

Why do these insights matter?

They let you reverse-engineer your competitors’ success to improve your SEO strategy.

And find high-authority sites linked to your competitors. Then, reach out to these websites for backlink opportunities.

Further reading: Link Building Strategies: The Complete List

Spy on Competitors’ PPC Campaigns

Serpstat’s Ads Examples feature lets you analyze your competitors’ paid search strategies. This helps you optimize your ad performance.

Here’s what you can learn from these examples:

• See what’s working for your competitors. Identify real ads competitors run and spot patterns in messaging, offers, and calls to action (CTAs).
• Find best-performing keywords. View which keywords each competitor’s ad ranks for to identify high-converting terms worth targeting.
• Analyze landing page strategies. Discover where competitor ads direct users. Is it a homepage, a booking page, or a dedicated landing page?

Strengths & Limitations

Strengths	Limitations
More budget-friendly than Similarweb or other alternatives	Smaller keyword and backlink databases
Analyze competitors side by side	Lacks multi-channel traffic data
Detailed PPC analysis lets you see ad examples that perform well for competitors

Further reading: Serpstat Review: Is This SEO Tool Worth It?

Exploding Topics

Best for entrepreneurs and marketers needing early trend insights to capitalize on emerging opportunities

Pricing: Free (paid plans start at $39 per month)

Exploding Topics is a market research and trend discovery tool that identifies emerging trends before they peak.

While Similarweb focuses on existing competitors, Exploding Topics helps you spot rising trends before they take off. The tool analyzes search data, social media, and startup activity to identify tomorrow’s opportunities.

Why is Exploding Topics better than Similarweb?

Let’s take a glance:

	Exploding Topics	Similarweb
Primary Focus	Trend discovery and market opportunities	Competitor intelligence and market research
Trend Detection	AI-driven trend forecasting	Relies on historical industry data
Keyword Database	Identifies rising search trends	Tracks established search volume
Competitive Analysis	Limited, focused on macro trends	Detailed competitor insights
Who’s It for?	Entrepreneurs, product developers, investors	Market researchers, large enterprises

Here are the key features included in Exploding Topics:

Discover Emerging Trends Before They Peak

Exploding Topics analyzes millions of data points from search engines, social media, online discussions, and startup investments to identify growing trends.

What does this mean for you?

Let’s say you have an affiliate blog selling home technology. You want to see what’s trending to understand which products or keywords have rising demand before they become mainstream.

Using Exploding Topics, you discover that “walking pads,” compact treadmills designed for home offices, are rapidly gaining traction.

This early insight gives you three key advantages:

• You can create content while competition is still low
• You can rank for keywords before they get expensive
• You can establish yourself as an authority before the trend peaks

In other words: you get more traffic with less effort by being first.

Spot Trends 12+ Months Before They Take Off

Exploding Topics’ forecasting feature can position you as an early authority and rank faster in search.

Imagine creating content around AI image enhancers.

At first glance, it’s hard to tell if the interest in AI-powered image tools will continue to grow or if it’s just temporary hype.

Instead of guessing, you check Exploding Topics’ forecasting data. And see that the search volume for “AI logo generator” is expected to rise steadily.

Knowing the keyword’s popularity may rise gives you the confidence to take action early and secure organic traffic before the competition.

Note: Forecasting is available in Exploding Topics Pro, but you can test it with a 14-day trial for $1. After 14 days, Pro memberships start at $39 per month.

Strengths & Limitations

Strengths	Limitations
Provides long-term trend growth insights	Not focused on competitor intelligence
Predicts emerging trends before they peak	Doesn’t show competitors’ website traffic data

Match Your Similarweb Alternative to Your Growth Stage

Your business stage determines which tool you’ll need.

Just starting out? Exploding Topics gives you free baseline data to validate ideas.

Ready to scale? Semrush .Trends reveals overlooked opportunities in your space.

The right tool accelerates your market research. But knowing how to interpret the data is what drives real growth.

Ready to turn market insights into sales? Our proven market analysis framework shows you exactly how to spot and capitalize on gaps your competitors are missing.

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