Simple SEO Traffic Estimator + Growth Strategies for 2025

Your web traffic is greatly influenced by your organic positions on Google.

This organic traffic estimator gives you a simple prediction for the monthly visitors to a page from a single keyword for different ranking scenarios.

You just need to enter the volume of your target keyword. The tool will predict the traffic that you can generate if you were ranking 1st or occupying a prominent SERP feature.

How Different SERP Features Impact Web Traffic

Web traffic no longer has a simple, direct relationship with rankings because of the presence of advanced SERP features that often unpredictably affect click behavior.

For example, you could have a featured snippet or appear in an AI Overview yet still draw fewer clicks than you would in a SERP with only blue organic links.

This SEO traffic estimator helps you set reasonable expectations for clicks from your top-ranking results depending on the SERP environment.

In the past, when SERP features were much fewer, your traffic from a keyword was largely a function of:

• Keyword volume
• Ranking position
• Associated clickthrough rate

But with the changing nature of modern search, it’s necessary to adapt to give your business the best chance of driving value from traditional as well as AI-led search.

Turning Traffic Projections into an Actionable Plan

1. Find Keywords with High Traffic Potential

One of the ways you can target high-traffic opportunities for your website is by finding keywords that trigger minimal SERP features.

Conventional SEO wisdom holds that high recurring traffic only results from high-volume keywords.

But this overlooks a crucial factor.

That is, even top rankings for high-volume keywords yield minimal visibility when SERP features dominate the results.

Fortunately for us, traffic-stealing features like snippets and AI Overviews don't appear for every search.

This creates opportunities to find keywords with lower competition for visibility because these keywords can generate more clicks than higher-volume terms cluttered with SERP features.

The SEO traffic calculator clearly shows that aiming for “Position #1” gets you the best possible traffic when the SERP isn’t filled by other features.

The Semrush Keyword Magic Tool can help you find keywords that don’t trigger any SERP features.

After opening this tool, enter a broad keyword representing a topic you’re interested in and press “Search”.

Semrush will display thousands of keyword ideas instantly. Look above the keyword data table to find and click on the “Advanced filters” tab.

Then, click on SERP features and select “None”. Press the “Apply” button to activate the filters.

Semrush will now show you all the keywords that aren’t triggering any SERP features.

You can often find hidden opportunities by applying these keyword filters that are low in difficulty, in addition to having few SERP features.

In other words, these keywords offer better ranking potential and higher clickthroughs at the same time.

That’s one solid strategy for keeping your organic traffic ticking despite the SERP feature takeover for other search terms.

2. Optimize for Getting Featured in Existing SERP Features

SERP features aren’t always avoidable. In fact, they dominate Google results for many important keywords.

In this situation, competing for these features becomes essential to maintain your share of voice.

You can still drive meaningful traffic and conversions from these SERP sources; it will just be with a lower traffic baseline than classic search results.

So, in addition to targeting keywords that are free from SERP feature clutter, you should also try to get the most out of those keywords where notable SERP features have a strong presence.

AI Overviews

When researching keywords with the Semrush Keyword Magic Tool, you can quickly check if a keyword is triggering an AI Overview.

Just hover your cursor over the number in the SF column to confirm if AI Overview is one of the features appearing for this keyword.

While winning an AI Overview citation for a blog post isn’t a hard science, here are a few things you can do to improve your chances:

• Focus on passage-level retrieval: AI Overviews often cite articles based on individual paragraphs or sentences strongly answering the search intent. Try writing short and informative sentences focused on a single core idea at the beginning of your key sections.
• Cover sub-queries and sub-intents: Most topics can be broken down into additional queries and intents that are related but distinct from the main idea. For example, providing recommendations for different kinds of user personas on a product comparison page can help Google reference your content for comparison queries.
• Use original insights and add statistics: AI answers like quoting statistics whenever possible. Incorporate original insights, provide statistical data, and give examples to enrich your content for AI retrieval.

The best way to optimize for AI Overviews is by tracking what’s already working.

You can use Semrush Organic Research to analyze keywords ranking in AI Overviews. You can perform this analysis for your domain or any of your competitors’.

Study the content to guess why it might be winning in AI Overviews. You can often discover content gaps that might help you earn a spot in AI Overviews by covering them.

Featured Snippets

Compared to AI Overviews, featured snippets offer higher visibility since they’re pulled straight from a single content source with a link underneath.

Having an entire answer box dedicated to you alone gives you more exposure than appearing in a crowded space where you’re linked alongside many competitors (AIOs).

So, despite the reduced traffic potential of featured snippets, they can give you a bigger boost than a low rank on the 1st page or an AIO.

Once again, the Keyword Magic Tool can tell you if the featured snippet occurs for a keyword.

The same general principles I recommended for AI Overviews also apply to feature snippet optimizations.

Once you know the keyword you’re targeting has a featured snippet on SERPs, you need to create a paragraph, list, or table that’s more informative and comprehensive than the existing snippet.

Here are a few tips for optimizing your featured snippet sections:

• Immediate answers: Write a 45-60 word answer block immediately under a heading that directly addresses a question or problem.
• Keyword usage: Using exact or closely matching keywords in featured snippet sections is still useful for signaling relevance to Google.
• Focus on informativeness: If a paragraph snippet is ranking, create a paragraph that packs more information in the same number of words. Consider adding statistics and eliminating any padding and unnecessary words.
• Comprehensive lists: If a list snippet is ranking, create a numbered or bulleted list that is longer and more complete than the current snippets. Google tends to swap in the most comprehensive list.
• Data tables: For table snippets, consider adding more columns and rows than the current snippet. But stay focused on providing helpful data to answer the search intent more deeply, rather than simply stretching the table for the sake of it.

Target AI Search Discovery in LLM Conversations

Traffic diversification is a critical strategy to keep visitors coming in the low-click era of the web.

The new benchmarks for traffic are lower for everyone. But the good news is that the value of your traffic can still grow higher than ever before.

Semrush projects that the value of visitors from LLMs will surpass that of traditional Google search somewhere between 2026 and 2027.

This is a strong reason to optimize your web content for AI search engines like Google AI, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and others.

Picking Up Traffic From AI Search Optimization

You need a strong understanding of your current performance in AI search engines to plan your optimizations.

It’s very helpful to chat with AI tools yourself by acting as a customer and see whether it speaks of you favorably or at all.

For a more rigorous analysis, you can use the Semrush AI SEO Toolkit. It reveals mentions and share of voice over time as compared to your main competitors.

If your competitors have an edge over you, these charts will help you discover how fast their visibility is growing.

Along with tracking your mentions in AI responses, it also highlights the factors that AI is portraying as your strengths or weaknesses.

It’s a fantastic way to identify common complaints about your brand or product that you can fix to influence future AI responses in your favor.

These ideas about improvements also lend themselves to content topics that you can push to position yourself strongly in areas where AI previously considered you weak.

Another very useful feature is the Question Breakdown table. You can review this to find the exact questions where you’ve earned a mention in the AI response.

It also highlights your ranking in the response as opposed to your competitors’.

You can expand the question to reveal the AI chat response.

Study how AI positions you in responses where you rank high and compare it with those where you rank low.

This can help guide your content marketing strategy by addressing the prompt questions in your content.

At the same time, you can touch upon these topics on notable websites that AI might use to form an opinion about you.

Analyze Click Potential to Identify Best Opportunities

This SEO traffic estimator shows you how traffic varies across ranking scenarios, from clean Position #1 results to competitive SERPs with AI Overviews or Featured Snippets.

Use this calculator to prioritize keywords by their traffic potential, if that’s your main goal.

With the Semrush free trial, you can find keywords by the specific kind of SERP features they trigger. This way, you’ll have an easier time adjusting your strategy to the SERP behavior for each keyword you want to target.