# Finding out website traffic **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [February 21, 2007, 10:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/finding-out-website-traffic/393072 "2007-02-21T10:44:45Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 8\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Dunderman](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/ecb155/32.png) [@Dunderman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dunderman)\ **Post date:** [February 21, 2007, 10:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/finding-out-website-traffic/393072/1 "2007-02-21T10:44:45Z")
Is there a way to find out how much traffic, in absolute numbers, a website gets, if I am in no way affiliated with the website in question? ---
**Author:** ![Derleth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b9e5f3/32.png) [@Derleth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Derleth)\ **Post date:** [February 21, 2007, 10:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/finding-out-website-traffic/393072/2 "2007-02-21T10:47:14Z")
You could find out who is hosting the site and ask them really nicely. 😉 Seriously, there is no way of doing what you want without rerouting some pretty fundamental parts of the Internet’s infrastructure (physical or logical). ---
**Author:** ![Dunderman](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/ecb155/32.png) [@Dunderman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dunderman)\ **Post date:** [February 21, 2007, 10:50am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/finding-out-website-traffic/393072/3 "2007-02-21T10:50:19Z")
How do ranking sites find out the traffic of the sites they rank? ---
**Author:** ![friedo](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/8edcca/32.png) [@friedo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/friedo)\ **Post date:** [February 21, 2007, 1:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/finding-out-website-traffic/393072/4 "2007-02-21T13:25:05Z")
[QUOTE=Priceguy] How do ranking sites find out the traffic of the sites they rank? [/QUOTE] It’s the web version of a Nielson box. People install software that tracks their usage in exchange for swell prizes. This small sample is then used to extrapolate overall statistics. ---
**Author:** ![muttrox](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/a8b319/32.png) [@muttrox](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/muttrox)\ **Post date:** [February 21, 2007, 4:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/finding-out-website-traffic/393072/5 "2007-02-21T16:10:15Z")
You can follow a sample of users around. You can get these users ethically or not (spyware). You can pay people, Comscore and Neilsen both have large panels of users they follow around. Websites can also self-report, and have those results audited. My companies numbers are vetted by I-pro, who looks at our log files once a quarter to make sure we’re counting in the correct way. All of these share some common issues with counting though - it’s almost always cookie based, and that creates problems. Users might not cache cookies. You might look at a site once from home and once from work. A library terminal is shared by multiple users. There’s actually a lot of fine points to counting, web analytics is based on some shifting sand. That said, there’s a lot of difference between trying to find this out for a large or a small site. What are you looking at? ---
**Author:** ![anson2995](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/c77e96/32.png) [@anson2995](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/anson2995)\ **Post date:** [February 21, 2007, 4:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/finding-out-website-traffic/393072/6 "2007-02-21T16:20:25Z")
I think that [Alexa](http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?&range=6m&size=large&compare_sites=&url=http://straightdope.com) has what you’re looking for. ---
**Author:** ![Dunderman](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/ecb155/32.png) [@Dunderman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dunderman)\ **Post date:** [February 21, 2007, 4:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/finding-out-website-traffic/393072/7 "2007-02-21T16:30:01Z")
[QUOTE=muttrox] What are you looking at? [/QUOTE] A number of small sites. [QUOTE=anson2995] I think that [Alexa](http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?&range=6m&size=large&compare_sites=&url=http://straightdope.com) has what you’re looking for. [/QUOTE] I only found ranking there, not absolute numbers. Where is it? ---
**Author:** ![muttrox](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/a8b319/32.png) [@muttrox](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/muttrox)\ **Post date:** [February 21, 2007, 5:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/finding-out-website-traffic/393072/8 "2007-02-21T17:50:12Z")
I think for small sites, you’re probably up the creek. User samples won’t do it, so they would have to be self-reported numbers.