How to See Google Analytics for Other Sites
Wondering if you can peek inside a competitor's Google Analytics account to see their traffic numbers? The short answer is no, you can't view the specific Google Analytics data for a website you don't own or have permission to access. This article will explain exactly why that private data is locked down and, more importantly, walk you through the professional methods and tools you can use to estimate their traffic and performance for powerful competitive analysis.
Why You Can't Directly Access Someone Else's Google Analytics
Thinking you can look up another site's Google Analytics (GA) is a common misconception, especially for those new to digital marketing. It's helpful to think of a company’s GA account like its internal financial records or sales CRM - it’s private, proprietary data, and there are very good reasons for that.
It's All About Privacy and Ownership
Google Analytics data belongs to the website owner. It contains sensitive information not just about their business performance but also about their website visitors. Sharing this data without consent would be a massive breach of trust and a violation of privacy regulations like GDPR and CCPA.
The only legitimate way to see another site's GA data is to be granted access by the owner. They would have to manually add your Google account as a user with "Viewer" permissions (or higher) in their GA property settings. This typically only happens in a few scenarios:
You are a marketing agency or consultant working for them.
You are considering buying their website or business and it's part of due diligence.
It's a partner company with a data-sharing agreement.
So, unless you're being hired by your competitor, direct access is off the table. But the goal isn't to spy, it's to learn. And you can still learn a lot by other means.
The Right Goal: Competitive Intelligence Over Analytics Snooping
Your actual goal isn't to look at their GA dashboard, it's to understand their digital strategy and performance so you can improve your own. You're trying to answer questions like:
Roughly how much traffic are they getting?
Where does their traffic come from (Google search, social media, ads)?
What are their most popular pages or pieces of content?
What keywords are bringing them the most organic traffic?
Who is linking to them and sending them referral traffic?
Fortunately, you can uncover high-quality estimates for all of these questions using trusted third-party competitive intelligence tools.
Tools and Techniques for Estimating Competitor Website Performance
While you can't see their exact GA data, you can get incredibly close with sophisticated tools that analyze publicly available data, clickstream data from user panels, search engine rankings, and other signals to create detailed performance models. Here are the best methods professionals use.
1. Competitive Intelligence Platforms (The All-in-Ones)
These platforms are the gold standard for getting a holistic view of a competitor’s online presence. They pull data from countless sources to estimate a website's overall performance.
Top Tools: Similarweb, Ahrefs, and Semrush
These are the leading names in the space. You simply enter your competitor's domain, and they generate a dashboard full of insights. While their exact methodologies differ, they provide similar reports.
What You Can Learn:
Traffic Overview: An estimate of total monthly visits, which can be broken down by device (desktop vs. mobile) and geography. Don't obsess over the exact number, but pay close attention to the trend line. Is their traffic growing, declining, or flat?
Traffic Channels: A breakdown very similar to Google Analytics, showing the estimated percentage of traffic from Direct, Search, Social, Referral, Email, and Paid channels. This is invaluable for understanding their marketing mix. Do they rely heavily on SEO? Or is a massive social media presence driving their visits?
Audience Interests & Demographics: Get an idea of the age, gender, and interests of the site's visitors, which helps you see if you're targeting the same audience.
Top Referring Sites: See which websites are sending them the most referral traffic. This is a great way to find potential partners or PR opportunities.
Practical Tip: Use these tools to benchmark 2-3 of your top competitors against your own site. The comparison is often more valuable than the raw numbers themselves. See where their strategy is different from yours and identify potential opportunities.
2. Deeper SEO Analysis (For Organic Search Dominance)
For many businesses, organic search is the most important channel. Tools like Ahrefs and Semrush specialize in reverse-engineering a website's SEO performance.
How to Analyze Their SEO Strategy:
Find Their Top Organic Keywords: You can see a list of every keyword they rank for in Google, along with their position and the estimated traffic each keyword brings. This is a goldmine for understanding their target customers' search intent.
Perform a Content Gap Analysis: This feature, available in most SEO tools, directly compares your site's keyword rankings with a competitor's. It instantly shows you all the valuable keywords they are ranking for that you are not, giving you a clear roadmap for new content creation.
Analyze Their Backlink Profile: A backlink is a link from another website to theirs. Backlinks are a crucial ranking factor for Google and a source of referral traffic. You can see every single website that links to your competitor. Identify high-quality sites linking to them and see if you can earn a similar link through outreach or by creating better content. Seeing who endorses their brand tells you a lot about their industry authority.
3. On-the-Ground Social Media and Content Inspection
Sometimes the most straightforward methods yield great directional insights. Go directly to their public-facing properties to gauge engagement.
What to Look For:
Review Their Social Profiles: Look at their primary social media channels (e.g., LinkedIn, Instagram, X, Facebook). How many followers do they have? More importantly, what is their engagement rate like? Are people commenting on, liking, and sharing their posts? High engagement often translates to a healthy flow of social traffic back to their website.
Analyze Their Blog and Site Content: Read their most recent blog posts. Do they have a lot of comments? Do they use social sharing plugins that display the number of shares? This qualitative data gives you a feel for whether their content is resonating with their audience.
Use a Tool like BuzzSumo: Tools like BuzzSumo allow you to enter a competitor's domain and see which of their content has received the most social shares across different platforms. This helps you instantly identify their most viral or successful content topics.
4. Using Google's "site:" Search Operator
This is an oldie-but-a-goodie technique that costs nothing and takes five seconds.
How It Works:
Go to Google and type site:yourcompetitor.com then hit enter. This command tells Google to show you all the pages it has indexed from that specific domain.
What It Tells You:
Content Footprint: The number of results gives you a rough idea of the size of their website. A site with 5,000 indexed pages is likely getting more organic traffic than one with 50.
Topical Authority: The pages listed first in this search are often the ones Google considers the most authoritative or important on that site. This can quickly give you a sense of their core content themes.
Final Thoughts
So while you can't get a login to your competitor's Google Analytics, you can gather an enormous amount of competitive intelligence. By using tools like Similarweb or Ahrefs and combining them with manual research, you can build a powerful and accurate picture of their digital marketing strategy, uncover their traffic sources, find their top-performing content, and identify opportunities to improve your own.
After analyzing your competitors, the focus should always return to your own performance. Understanding your own data - from Google Analytics, your ad platforms, your CRM - is what truly drives growth. We know how fragmented this can be, manually pulling reports from a dozen different places. That's why we created Graphed. It connects all your data sources in one place, allowing you to instantly build live dashboards and get answers using simple, natural language. Instead of spending hours in separate analytics platforms, you can ask a question and get a real-time report in seconds, helping you act on your insights when they matter most.