The Traffic Estimator

Read where their growth actually comes from.

Total visits is the number everyone chases and the number that matters least. What actually tells you how a competitor grows is the mix behind that number: how much comes from search, how much walks in the front door by typing the domain straight into the address bar, how much rides in on social or referral links, how much is bought outright. Two free tools promise to hand you that mix in under a minute. In July 2026, one of them will not let you in the door, and the other has quietly stopped showing the thing you came for.

What to do: Drop a competitor's domain into Similarweb's free tier and Cloudflare Radar. Read past the total-visits number to the channel mix: search, direct, social, referral, paid.

Why it works: The channel split tells you where growth actually comes from, usually one or two channels doing all the work. You copy the channel that is winning for them, not the one they blog about.

Example: I pointed Cloudflare Radar at zapier.com, shopify.com, and cloudflare.com's own domain in July 2026. All three came back with the identical line: "Categorization information currently unavailable." The free per-domain page no longer shows a channel split or a popularity rank for anyone, only DNS, WHOIS, and certificate history.

Walk it through

I ran this against zapier.com in July 2026. Here is exactly what came back.

1. Ask Similarweb for the channel mix first.

curl -sI -A "Mozilla/5.0 ... Chrome/126.0.0.0" https://www.similarweb.com/website/zapier.com/

No page, no chart, no bytes. AWS WAF answers with a 202 and an x-amzn-waf-action: challenge header before Similarweb's own code ever runs. A script gets a challenge page. A signed-in human in a real browser, clicking through manually, still gets the Marketing Channels chart Similarweb has always shown, so this is a bot wall, not a dead feature.

Screenshot: Similarweb's Marketing Channels bar or donut on the competitor's overview page, captured manually while signed in.

2. Cross-check on Cloudflare Radar's domain page. It loads clean, but read what's missing.

radar.cloudflare.com/domains/domain/zapier.com

The page renders fully and fast, no wall, no captcha. But the box that used to carry a category and a popularity rank now says "Categorization information currently unavailable. Try again later or look up another domain." I ran the same URL against shopify.com and notion.so and got the same sentence both times. Then I ran it against cloudflare.com itself, Cloudflare's own domain, on Cloudflare's own tool, and got it a third time. This isn't a gap in zapier.com's data. The per-domain channel and popularity view is gone from the free tier for every domain right now.

3. Fall back to the one list that's still public: Domain Rankings.

radar.cloudflare.com/domains

This list is real, public, and dated the day I pulled it. It just doesn't go deep enough to help here. Zapier isn't in a worldwide Top 100 built from google.com, googleapis.com, and cloudflare.com, and neither is most of the market you actually compete in. The list tells you the shape of the entire internet's traffic, not one company's channel mix.

The read

• A bot wall is itself a data point. When curl gets a WAF challenge and a signed-in browser gets the chart, the tool still works, it just now requires an account. Budget five minutes and a login before you write off the tactic.
• "Currently unavailable" across every domain means the feature moved, not that the data disappeared. One blank result could be a fluke. Three domains including the vendor's own coming back identical means you're reading a product change, not a fluke.
• When you do get the real channel chart, read the shape, not the number. Search-heavy is beatable with content and AI visibility. Direct-heavy means brand and budget did the work. A social or referral spike means one channel is carrying the whole business.

Steal it

Sign in before you conclude a channel-mix tool is dead. Both Similarweb and Radar gate their better views behind a free account now, and the wall you hit as an anonymous script is not the wall a logged-in human hits. Create the account once, and the Marketing Channels chart is still there.

When you do get the read, act on the shape. A competitor pulling most of its visits from organic search is beatable with better pages and showing up in AI answers. One running mostly on direct and paid is telling you the moat is brand and ad budget, so go pick a different fight, maybe a channel they're not paying attention to at all.

Gotchas

• Free tiers change without notice. What worked when this book went to press may already be gated differently by the time you read it. Confirm the current state yourself before you trust a screenshot, including this one.
• The tools never agree on exact numbers even when they both load. Read both for shape and trend, not as ground truth, and never quote either one's figure as fact in a deck.
• A blocked request is not permission to route around the wall. Signing in and reading what you're shown is fair game. Building a scraper to defeat the WAF challenge at scale is not reconnaissance anymore, it's an attack on their infrastructure.