How to Use Google Analytics for Other Websites

You can learn a lot from your own Google Analytics data, but the real growth often happens when you understand what’s working for others in your space. This article breaks down how to legally and ethically analyze other websites to uncover their traffic strategies, most popular content, and hidden opportunities. We will cover the direct methods for gaining access and the third-party tools you can use to estimate performance from the outside.

Graphed

Build AI Agents for Marketing

Build virtual employees that run your go to market. Connect your data sources, deploy autonomous agents, and grow your company.

Build Your First Agent

Can You Actually Use Google Analytics for Other Websites?

Let's clear this up right away: No, you cannot log in to a random competitor's Google Analytics account. That data is private, confidential, and belongs entirely to the website owner. There's no secret backdoor or tool that grants direct access to another site's private GA property. Trying to gain unauthorized access would be illegal and unethical.

However, the question isn’t really about logging into their account. It's about getting the same kind of insights you’d find in Google Analytics: Where does their traffic come from? What are their most popular pages? Who is their audience? Fortunately, you can answer all of these questions using a combination of clever strategies and powerful third-party tools designed for competitive intelligence.

Method 1: Gaining Access (The Official Way)

While you can't peek into a stranger's GA account, there are several common scenarios where you might be granted official, permission-based access. This is the only way to see the actual analytics data for a site you don't own.

AI Agents for Marketing

Crash Course

Graphed

Free PDF · the crash course

AI Agents for Marketing Crash Course

Learn how to deploy AI marketing agents across your go-to-market — the best tools, prompts, and workflows to turn your data into autonomous execution without writing code.

Download the PDF

When You’re an Agency, Consultant, or Freelancer

If you're hired to provide marketing, SEO, or web development services, getting access to your client's Google Analytics is standard practice. To make this professional and easy, you need to know what to ask for.

How to Request Access:

• What to ask for: You'll need to provide your client with the Google email address you want to use. It’s best to use your professional business email associated with a Google account.
• Which permission level to request:

Instructions for Your Client (How to Add a User in Google Analytics 4):

You can make their life easier by sending them these simple instructions:

1. Log in to your Google Analytics account.
2. Click on Admin in the bottom-left corner (the gear icon).
3. Make sure you’ve selected the correct Account and Property in the columns.
4. In the Property column, click on Property Access Management.
5. Click the blue + button in the top-right corner and select Add users.
6. Enter the email address(es) you want to add.
7. Select the appropriate permission level (e.g., Viewer or Editor).
8. Click the Add button.

During Partnerships, Collaborations, or Due Diligence

Other situations where you might get a look at the data include:

• Business Acquisitions: During the due diligence process, a potential buyer is often granted temporary "Viewer" access to verify traffic claims.
• High-Value Media Buys: If you're planning a significant advertising campaign or sponsored content piece on a publisher's website, you can request anonymized traffic reports or screenshots of relevant GA pages to justify the ad spend.
• Affiliate Partnerships: Some programs might share specific conversion data or dashboard access to help affiliates optimize their promotional funnels.

Method 2: Using Tools to "Read" Your Competitors' Strategies

For everyone else, this is where the real work begins. You can’t see their raw data, but you can see the public footprints they leave all over the web. Competitive intelligence platforms analyze these footprints using massive datasets to provide remarkably accurate estimations of a website's performance.

The key here is to use these tools to answer the same questions you would ask inside Google Analytics.

Graphed

Build AI Agents for Marketing

Build virtual employees that run your go to market. Connect your data sources, deploy autonomous agents, and grow your company.

Build Your First Agent

What Their Traffic Channels Look Like

Question you'd ask GA: "In the Acquisition report, which channels drive the most traffic?"

Tool to use: Similarweb

Similarweb specializes in giving a bird's-eye view of a website's entire traffic profile. It breaks down estimated visits by source: direct, search, social, referral, mail (email), and display ads. This is incredibly valuable for understanding a competitor’s overall marketing mix.

How to use it:

1. Enter your competitor's domain into Similarweb.
2. Scroll down to the "Marketing Channels Mix" section.
3. Analyze the chart. If 80% of their traffic is from "Search," you know an SEO and content strategy is their top priority. If "Social" leads the way, their focus is on building a community on platforms like Instagram or LinkedIn. This tells you where you need to compete.

What Their Top Pages and Content Are

Question you'd ask GA: "In the Engagement report, what are my most-visited pages?"

Tool to use: Ahrefs or SEMrush

Tools like Ahrefs and SEMrush are essential for any SEO professional, largely because of how well they reveal a website's content performance. Their "Top Pages" reports show which pages on a competitor's site get the most estimated organic search traffic.

How to use it:

1. In Ahrefs' Site Explorer (or the equivalent in SEMrush), enter your competitor's domain.
2. Go to the "Top pages" report on the left sidebar.
3. This report shows you a list of their highest-traffic pages, the main keyword each page ranks for, and the estimated monthly traffic it receives.
4. Use this to reverse-engineer their content strategy. Are their top pages long-form blog posts? Free tools? Product landing pages? This list is your roadmap for content creation.

What Keywords They Rank For

Question you'd ask GA: "What queries are people searching for to find my site?" (via Google Search Console integration)

Tool to use: Ahrefs/SEMrush/Ubersuggest

Every major SEO tool can show you the keywords a competitor is ranking for. This goes beyond just their top pages and reveals their entire keyword footprint. A "Keyword Gap" analysis is particularly powerful here.

How to use it:

1. Use the "Keyword Gap" or "Content Gap" feature in your chosen SEO tool.
2. Enter your domain and the domains of 2-3 of your top competitors.
3. Run the report to find keywords that your competitors rank for, but you don't.
4. This is a goldmine of proven content ideas. You already know there's search demand for these topics, and your competitors are capitalizing on them. Now you can create superior content targeting these same terms.

Who Sends Them Referral Traffic

Question you'd ask GA: "Which websites are sending me the most referral traffic?"

Tool to use: Ahrefs or Similarweb

Understanding which websites link to your competitors and send them direct referral traffic is key for building partnerships and earning backlinks.

How to use it:

• In Ahrefs: Enter your competitor's domain and navigate to the "Backlinks" or "Referring Domains" report. You can filter this list to find high-authority sites, guest post opportunities, or podcast appearances they've made that you could replicate.
• In Similarweb: The "Referrals" section shows the top websites sending them clicks. This can uncover partnerships, review sites, or industry directories you might have overlooked.

AI Agents for Marketing

Crash Course

Graphed

Free PDF · the crash course

AI Agents for Marketing Crash Course

Learn how to deploy AI marketing agents across your go-to-market — the best tools, prompts, and workflows to turn your data into autonomous execution without writing code.

Download the PDF

Important Caveat: Remember These Are Estimates

The data from tools like Similarweb and Ahrefs is incredibly powerful, but it's important to keep in mind that they are estimates. They will never perfectly match the real numbers inside a competitor’s Google Analytics account. The data is meant for gauging trends, identifying strategies, and comparing relative performance - not for absolute precision. Don't get hung up on the exact numbers, focus on the strategic direction the data provides.

Final Thoughts

While you can't get direct access to another website's Google Analytics, you can uncover the same valuable insights by using competitive intelligence tools. This approach allows you to benchmark your performance, reverse-engineer successful content strategies, and discover new growth opportunities based on what’s already working for others in your industry.

Analyzing competitor data is revealing, but juggling that information while trying to understand your own performance across platforms like Google Analytics, Shopify, and your ad accounts can be demanding. That’s why we built Graphed. We connect directly to all your data sources, letting you ask plain-English questions to instantly generate the real-time reports and dashboards you need. It helps you keep all your own essential metrics in one clear view, so you can spend less time pulling reports and more time acting on the competitive insights you've gathered.