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Organic traffic

Organic traffic is visits that a site gets from unpaid results, such as regular search results and free product listings, rather than from ad clicks.

How it works

A store can appear twice for one search: in an ad and in the free results. Google states that spending on search ads has no impact on organic ranking.

A shopper who clicked the ad might have clicked the free result instead. How many ad visits would have come anyway is a question of incrementality: standard reports don’t show it, only a test with a control group does. On branded search, the store’s free result for its own name can sit right next to its ad. Our guide to SEO and Google Ads together covers when ads still pay where the store ranks.

Where you see it

  • Google Search Console, Performance report: clicks and impressions from Google Search results.
  • Google Analytics 4: “Organic Search” for unpaid links in search results, including AI Overviews and AI Mode; “Organic Shopping” for shopping sites and Merchant Center free listings. Analytics counts sessions and Search Console counts clicks, so the numbers differ.
  • Google Ads, paid and organic report: searches where the site showed in ads, organic results or both. It needs a linked Search Console account.

Example

Example store, not client data.

The tableware shop gets 8,000 ad clicks and 6,000 organic clicks a month, split evenly between two matched groups of regions. For one month it pauses ads in one group. There, 4,000 ad clicks disappear and organic clicks grow from 3,000 to 3,600, while the group with ads stays at 3,000. Organic clicks recovered 600 of the 4,000 lost ad clicks, or 15%.

Not to be confused with

  • Free listings — unpaid product listings from a Merchant Center feed, one source of organic traffic. When Analytics identifies their visits as Merchant Center traffic, it counts them as Organic Shopping, not Organic Search.

Right and wrong readings

  • Wrong: “The paid and organic report shows little overlap, so Shopping ads take nothing from organic.” Right: the report covers text ads only, so Shopping ads aren’t in it.
  • Wrong: “We rank first, so without ads the same visits would come for free.” Right: only a test shows how many visits come back for free. In the example, organic clicks recovered 600 of the 4,000 lost ad clicks.

Sources