How to See Organic Traffic in Google Analytics

Your search engine optimization (SEO) strategy is humming along, but tracking its impact can feel abstract without the right data. The most direct way to measure your SEO success is by checking how many people are finding your website through search engines. This article will show you exactly how to find and analyze your organic traffic in Google Analytics 4 and what to do with that information once you have it.

What is Organic Traffic, and Why Is It So Important?

In short, organic traffic refers to any visitor who arrives on your website by clicking a link from a search engine results page (SERP) that you didn't pay for. Someone types a query into Google, sees your website listed in the results (not the ads), clicks on it, and voilà, you’ve got one organic visitor.

Why should you care so much about this specific group of visitors?

• It's a direct reflection of your SEO efforts. Rising organic traffic is one of the strongest indicators that your content is ranking well and connecting with the right audience.
• Visitors have a higher intent. Unlike someone scrolling through social media, a person coming from a search engine is actively looking for an answer, product, or solution that you might offer. They're often closer to making a decision.
• It's a long-term asset. While paid ads stop the moment you stop paying for them, a well-ranked article can bring in sustained, "free" traffic for months or even years.

In Google Analytics, you’ll see traffic broken down into a few main "channel groupings." Here's how organic separates itself from the others:

• Organic Search: Unpaid clicks from search engines (Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, etc.).
• Paid Search: Clicks from paid ads that appear on search engines (like Google Ads).
• Direct: Visitors who typed your URL directly into their browser or used a bookmark.
• Referral: Visitors who clicked a link to your site from another website.
• Organic Social: Visitors who came from an unpaid post on social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.).

Understanding this distinction is the first step. Now, let’s find that valuable organic traffic data inside your GA4 account.

How to Find Organic Traffic in Google Analytics 4

If you're still used to the old layout of Universal Analytics, the GA4 interface can feel a bit jarring. Don't worry, finding the core traffic reports is actually quite simple once you know where to look. Let's walk through it.

Step 1: Navigate to the Traffic Acquisition Report

The most straightforward way to see your traffic sources is through the Traffic Acquisition report. This is where GA4 breaks down how users are arriving on your site.

Here's how to get there:

1. Log into your Google Analytics 4 account.
2. On the left-hand navigation menu, click on Reports (it has a little chart icon).
3. Once the Reports section expands, go to the Acquisition section and click on Traffic acquisition.

You’ll now be looking at a table that shows a list of channels under the column titled "Session default channel group."

Step 2: Identify "Organic Search" in the Channel Table

In the data table at the bottom of the page, look for the row labeled Organic Search. This one line summarizes the performance of all your traffic coming from unpaid search engine results.

To the right of the channel name, you'll see a series of performance metrics. Here’s a quick breakdown of what the most important ones mean in GA4:

• Users: The total number of unique individuals who visited your site from that channel.
• Sessions: The total number of visits from that channel. A single user can have multiple sessions.
• Engaged sessions: The number of sessions that lasted longer than 10 seconds, had a conversion event, or had at least 2 pageviews. This has replaced "Bounce Rate" as a primary engagement metric.
• Engagement rate: The percentage of sessions that were engaged. (Engaged sessions ÷ Total sessions). A higher number is better!
• Event count & Conversions: This shows the total number of actions (events) visitors took, and specifically which of those actions you've marked as a "Conversion" (like a purchase or a form submission).

This single report provides a fantastic high-level overview. You can quickly see how organic stacks up against other channels and get a pulse on your SEO performance for any given date range.

Going Deeper: Analyzing Your Organic Traffic Data

Finding the report is just the start. The real value comes from digging into the data to understand what content is driving that traffic and who those visitors are. Here are a few essential ways to analyze your organic traffic more deeply.

1. Find Your Top-Performing Organic Landing Pages

Knowing your overall organic traffic numbers is great, but which specific pages are attracting all those visitors? This is arguably the most actionable insight you can get.

There are two quick ways to find this.

Method A: Using the main Traffic Acquisition report

1. In the same Traffic acquisition report, click the small blue "+" button next to the "Session default channel group" column header.
2. From the dropdown menu that appears, search for and select Landing page + query string.

You’ll now see a second column showing the specific pages where sessions began. You can now scroll down to the "Organic Search" section and see the exact pages that are bringing in visitors from search engines. This tells you which blog posts, product pages, or service pages are winning at SEO.

Method B: Starting from the Landing Pages report

1. In the left menu, go to Reports > Engagement > Landing pages.
2. At the top of the page, click All Users.
3. A configuration panel will slide out from the right. Under “Build Filter,” set the dimension to Session default channel group.
4. For the Match Type, choose exactly matches.
5. For the Value, select Organic Search.
6. Click the blue Apply button.

The entire report will now be filtered to show only data from your organic traffic, making it easy to focus solely on which content serves as the best entry point for your site via search.

2. Compare Organic Traffic Over Different Time Periods

Is your organic traffic actually growing? The easiest way to tell is to compare your performance across different date ranges.

1. In the top right corner of any GA4 report, you'll see a date selector (e.g., "Last 28 days"). Click on it.
2. Select the time frame you want to analyze (e.g., "Last 90 days").
3. At the bottom of the date calendar, toggle the Compare switch on.
4. Select "Preceding period" to compare it against the prior 90 days, or choose a custom date range.
5. Click Apply.

Now, every metric in your report will show the data for the current period, the previous period, and the percentage change - a clear and instant progress report for your SEO strategy.

3. Create Standalone Organic Traffic Reports and Filter

Instead of manually filtering every time, you can create reports that isolate only the data you care about. Creating a filter to view only organic search data is a powerful way to eliminate the noise from other channels.

1. From a report like Traffic acquisition, look for the Add filter option at the top of the page.
2. A filter builder will appear. Use the following conditions:
3. Click Apply.

Now, every tile and data point on the page is focused exclusively on organic search. This is incredibly useful for deep analysis where you want to add or remove various secondary dimensions without having to sift through data from other channels.

How to Use This Data to Inform Your Strategy

Gathering data is only powerful if you act on it. Once you're comfortable finding and filtering your organic traffic data in GA4, you can start making smarter marketing decisions.

Identify Your "Hits"

Look at your top organic landing pages. These are the pieces of content that Google loves and your audience finds valuable. Ask yourself:

• Can I update or expand this content to make it even better?
• What topics or formats are shared by my most successful pages? Let's make more of that.
• Could I add a stronger call-to-action (CTA) on these high-traffic pages to improve conversions?

Find Underperforming Content

Sort your landing pages by "Engagement Rate" in ascending order. If you see pages with a decent amount of traffic but a super low engagement rate, it might signal a disconnect. Perhaps the page content doesn't match the search intent, loads slowly, or isn't user-friendly. These are perfect candidates for an SEO refresh.

Connect Performance to Actions

Tie your analytics back to your actual work. Did you publish a big cluster of new blog posts last quarter? Compare the organic traffic from that period to the one before to quantify the impact. Did you optimize a specific page for a target keyword? Filter to see the traffic specifically for that page and see if there’s an upward trend.

Final Thoughts

By regularly checking in on your organic traffic via the Traffic acquisition report in GA4, you can get a clear measure of your SEO return on investment. Analyzing this data helps you understand which strategies are working, allowing you to double down on what resonates with search engines and your audience to create more successful content.

As you get more comfortable, you'll want to combine your Google Analytics data with other sources like Google Search Console or even sales data from a CRM like HubSpot. This is where creating manual reports can become incredibly time-consuming. At Graphed, we created a way to instantly connect all these data sources and generate dashboards automatically. Instead of clicking through menus and setting up filters, you can just ask a question like, "Show me my top organic landing pages by revenue," and get an automated, real-time dashboard in seconds, freeing you up to act on your insights rather than just chasing them down.