Organic traffic
Organic traffic is the visits your site gets from unpaid search results, as opposed to ads, email, social or other sources.
Organic traffic is the visits that reach your site from unpaid search results. Someone searches, sees your page in the results, and clicks. Visits from ads, email, social posts and other sites are counted separately.
For many businesses it's the biggest source of visits, and the clearest sign that SEO work is paying off.
How it's measured
Analytics tools decide where each visit came from using its referrer and any tags on the link. Google Analytics puts visits from search engines' unpaid results in the Organic Search channel. Paid clicks from the same search engines go to Paid Search, as long as your ads are tagged.
Search Console shows the other side: how often your pages appeared in Google's results, and how often people clicked. Put the two together and you can see which pages win searches and what those visitors do next.
For example, Harrow & Pine gets 12,000 organic visits a month, mostly to its product pages. Its care guides get only 900, but those visitors buy at twice the rate. That's worth knowing before it decides where to write next.
Organic traffic and AI search
AI answers change the sums. When a search shows an AI Overview, or a person asks an assistant instead of searching, some people get what they need without clicking anything. Organic traffic can fall while your brand is still being named.
AI assistants send traffic of their own. Google Analytics 4 has a separate AI Assistant channel for visits from assistants it recognises. Clicks from Google's own AI Overviews and AI Mode are another matter: Google says it counts them with the rest of your web search traffic in Search Console, in its guide to AI features.
So organic traffic alone no longer tells the whole story. Read it next to how often AI answers name you.
In AnswerOrbit
The AI traffic tab in Website shows the visits AI assistants sent to your site from Google Analytics, by assistant, landing page, country and device. Visibility shows how often the answers name you, whether or not anyone clicks.