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Which SEO numbers are measured, and which are estimates?

Published September 28, 2026 · Editor: Kaz (pen name)

Summary

The measured numbers are in Google Search Console: the clicks, impressions and positions your site actually got in Google Search. Keyword Planner gives estimates of monthly searches, and Google Trends gives a relative 0 to 100 index, not search counts. Competitor traffic in tools like Semrush and Ahrefs is modeled from panels, clickstream data and crawlers, so figures from two vendors are not directly comparable.

Search Console is measured, with gaps

Search Console is a free Google service, and its Performance report shows clicks, impressions, click-through rate and average position, defaulting to the past three months. When the question is what happened to your own site, this comes before any third-party estimate.

It does not show everything. The table stops at 1,000 rows, and queries searched only a handful of times are left out of the table for privacy while still counting in the chart totals. That is why the rows rarely add up to the total. New data usually takes two to three days to appear, and the most recent day is preliminary and can change within a few hours.

Competitor traffic is modeled

No vendor can see a competitor's Search Console or analytics account, so they build estimates from other sources. Semrush says its ranking data comes from Google results pages collected through third-party providers, covering the top 100 positions and updated anywhere from daily to monthly. Its traffic estimates start from a panel of more than 200 million anonymized users in over 190 countries and regions, plus clickstream data from hundreds of providers, run through a neural network that also draws on its ranking and backlink databases. Its backlinks come from its own crawler, which covers about 10 billion pages a day.

Ahrefs runs its own crawler too, visiting more than 8 billion pages every 24 hours. Different inputs and different scale mean the same competitor can look larger in one tool than another. The useful comparisons are inside one tool: the gap between you and a competitor, or how either of you moved since last year.

Keyword Planner and Trends answer different questions

Keyword Planner lives inside Google Ads. It estimates how many searches a keyword gets each month and what an ad on it would cost on average. Even the basic keyword ideas feature requires you to finish setting up a Google Ads account, billing information included. Very low-volume and sensitive keywords do not show up at all.

Google Trends divides each data point by total searches for that place and time, then scales the result from 0 to 100. It works from a sample of Google searches, drops repeat searches by the same person over a short period, and adds a little statistical noise. Low-volume terms show as 0, and two regions with the same score can have very different search volumes. Trends tells you whether interest in a term is rising. It does not tell you how many people search for it.

Even the live results page depends on who is looking

Looking at what actually ranks is the best way to read search intent, but it is a snapshot. Google says results can vary with the searcher's location, language and device, and Search Console's help says results are specific to the time, place, device and recent history of the person searching. The SERP analysis guide covers tools that record results under fixed conditions.

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Sources

Figures come from each vendor's own pricing pages and documentation. We have not tested these tools hands-on, and no ranking here is paid for.