Simulate Ahrefs Overview Traffic Report

Guide

What is the Ahrefs style traffic simulator?

The Ahrefs style traffic simulator draws an invented Site Explorer overview: the AI responses, backlink profile and search cards, a performance chart, the organic positions and branded traffic charts, and the side tables for locations, intents and link types. You choose the shape of the story with a handful of numbers, the tool generates everything else, and the result is ready to screenshot. It is an unaffiliated mock-up, not a product of Ahrefs.

When it comes in handy

• Showing what a link building or content program looks like over a year in a talk, a course, or a client explainer, without exposing a real client's data.
• Filling a slide, a pitch deck, or a landing page mock-up with a dashboard that reads as familiar at a glance.
• Explaining how DR, referring domains and organic traffic move together, and how they don't, by dragging one number at a time.
• Checking how a dashboard screenshot crops on social media before you have real numbers to show.
• Posting the joke version: the absurd hockey stick everyone recognizes, watermarked so nobody reads it as a result.

How to use

1. Enter the domain that should appear as the property. It also seeds the generator, so every derived number changes with it.
2. Enter the headline counts: Domain Rating, monthly organic traffic, organic keywords, monthly paid traffic, and the referring domains and backlinks behind them. Set the paid traffic to 0 for a property that runs no ads.
3. Enter the change over the period. +180% ends 2.8 times higher than it started, -60% ends at 40% of it, and 0% stays flat. The field tells you the level the traffic line starts from, so you can aim at the before and after you have in mind.
4. Pick the curve: a straight line, a gentle bend, or a hockey stick that saves the move for the end.
5. Type the AI Overviews and ChatGPT numbers, responses and pages each. The other five platforms on the card follow them, so raising ChatGPT lifts the whole table.
6. Press the dice button next to the seed until the generated tables read the way you want. It only moves what you did not type, so your own numbers stay where they are.
7. Pick the date range in the report's own dropdown, from 30 days to 2 years.
8. Click the checkboxes above each chart to choose which metrics the performance chart plots, which position buckets the stack holds, and which bands the branded chart shows. Hover a chart for the tooltip.
9. Switch the traffic table between organic and paid, and the backlink distribution between UR and DR.
10. Leave the watermark on, then screenshot the report.

Notes

• Everything is invented. The tool has no connection to Ahrefs, to a Site Explorer account, or to any backlink index, so a real domain still produces made-up numbers.
• The last point of every series lands exactly on the number you typed. The change, the curve and the range decide how it got there.
• Link counts only climb while the window rises, the way a backlink profile actually accumulates. Set a negative change and they are allowed to fall.
• The same settings always redraw the same report, because the generator is seeded from your domain, your Domain Rating and your counts. Change one digit to get a different site. The seed field is part of that seed too, so rerolling it is the quickest way to get a different looking site without touching the headline numbers.
• Keep the watermark on when the image will travel outside its context. Presenting a generated dashboard as your own reporting is misrepresentation.
• To mock up a Search Console report instead, use Simulate Google Search Console traffic. To mock up a single listing, use Preview Google search results.