What you can and can't learn about someone else's traffic
Only a site's owner can see its real traffic, in their own analytics. Everyone else is working from public signals: popularity lists such as Tranco, panels of browser users, search visibility estimates and links. That means every competitor traffic number you see, from any tool, free or paid, is an estimate. Estimates are still useful for telling a site with a few hundred visits a month from one with a few million, but they are not good enough to compare two sites of similar size.
Traffic rank vs traffic estimates
A traffic rank is a position in a list of sites ordered by popularity, where a lower number means more popular. A traffic estimate converts some signal, often a rank, into a visits-per-month figure. The rank is the more honest of the two, because it doesn't pretend to precision. FeedPulse Rank shows a site's position in the Tranco top-1M list, falls back to OpenPageRank for sites outside it, and labels its visits figure as an estimate. Sites in the FeedPulse network show the visits we actually recorded instead.
Domain age as a sanity check
Domain age tells you when the current registration of a domain began, and the earliest Wayback Machine snapshot tells you when the site was first archived. Together they're a quick sanity check: a shop claiming a decade of history on a domain registered last month deserves a closer look. Age doesn't help rankings by itself, and an expired domain that has been re-registered shows its new date, so read it alongside other signals rather than on its own.
Putting it together before a decision
For a quick, free research pass on any site, check four things: its traffic rank, to see which size band it sits in; its domain age and Wayback history, to see how long it has really existed; its referring domains, to see whether other sites vouch for it; and its own pages, for real contact details and recent content. If you're buying a site, ask the seller for read-only analytics access and revenue records. No public tool replaces that.
Questions to ask before trusting any traffic number
Where does the figure come from: the site's own analytics, a panel of users, a ranking list or a formula? Is it labelled as an estimate? What date range does it cover? And does the tool say how it handles bots? A tool that can't answer these questions clearly is giving you a guess dressed up as a measurement. FeedPulse labels its traffic figures as actual or estimated and lists every source on its data sources page.
Why the Alexa rank disappeared
For years the Alexa traffic rank was the default public answer to 'how popular is this site?'. Amazon retired Alexa.com on May 1, 2022, and nothing free has fully replaced it since. Paid tools such as Similarweb and Semrush publish rank and traffic figures, but most of the detail sits behind subscriptions. The guides below compare the free alternatives and explain what each one actually measures.