SEO potential is the measure of how much organic traffic you can generate through search engines like Google without a cent spent on ads. This free traffic can translate into increased brand awareness, leads, sales, and revenue.
Calculating SEO potential can be complex and time-consuming. But this is where my free SEO Potential Bot comes in. This simple tool automates the process of analyzing keywords, modeling ranking scenarios, and, in effect, calculating your/your client’s SEO traffic potential.
The bot is based on a simple method but gives you enough to:
- Save time and skip the manual work.
- Set more realistic goals.
- See how much uplift SEO can give your site.
The bot is free to use but requires a ChatGPT subscription, as all community bots do. I’ve included the prompt at the end of the article that you can use instead of the bot (you’ll still need a ChatGPT subscription to use data analysis functionality) or with other LLMs, such as Gemini or Claude.
Here’s how to get the input data with Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer.
- Ask the AI to provide a list of seed keywords. You can use a prompt like “Give me a list of seed keywords for a blog about personal finance.” Naturally, you can add your own keywords or get them from your competitors (here’s how).
- Go to the Matching terms report and open the Clusters by Parent Topic tab.
- Export the results in CSV, UTF-8.
- Upload the file to the bot and wait for the result. The bot might ask a simple follow-up question or ask for confirmation of the attached data — it’s AI, after all.
You can also ask the bot to explain the method and adjust the settings.
Tip
Use your competitor’s keywords to estimate traffic you could get if you went after their market.
Use Ahrefs’ Site Explorer export your competitor’s keywords. You will need up to 10k keywords so adjust the filters to stay within the limit, such as minimum volume and max ranking to filter out less significant keywords. Skip branded keywords, too.
Plug them into Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer to get parent topics and traffic potential data.
Finally, export the data and give it to the bot.
Traffic estimation divides search rankings into ranking buckets, applying specific click-through rate benchmarks to calculate potential traffic. CTRs reflect the reality that not everyone clicks on the first result. Higher-ranked keywords generally get more clicks, and CTRs help the bot account for this.
The bot simulates optimistic, realistic, and pessimistic ranking scenarios to show how different positions impact traffic.
The bot is designed for proprietary Ahrefs metrics:
- Traffic potential. Shows the total organic traffic the #1 ranking page for your target keyword receives from all the keywords it ranks for. Since a page can rank for hundreds of keywords and get traffic from all of them, traffic potential is often a better metric to consider than search volume alone.
- Parent topic. Determines if you can rank for your target keyword while targeting a more general topic instead. To identify the Parent Topic, Ahrefs takes the #1 ranking page for your keyword and finds the query responsible for sending the most search traffic to that page.
- Keyword difficulty. Gives an estimation of how hard it’ll be to rank in the top 10 organic search results on Google for a given keyword. It’s measured on a scale from 0 to 100, with the latter being the hardest to rank for.
It’s important to note that the bot doesn’t consider your website’s current rankings. Instead, it focuses on the overall potential of your target keywords. However, you can still use it to estimate potential traffic from the keywords you’re already targeting.
Export your target keywords from Ahrefs’ Rank Tracker or another tool of your choice and paste them into Keywords Explorer. The tool will find relevant parent topics based on your target keywords. Export the results and pass them to the bot.
For example, this site could get the highest traffic lift by focusing on the easiest keywords.
Tip
Another helpful method is to use ChatGPT to identify groups of terms that have the most potential for improvement. Here’s my colleague Patrick Stox explaining the method (and a few other cool prompts). 
SEO is a long-game strategy. Expect:
- Incremental improvements rather than overnight miracles.
- Consistent effort trumps sporadic bursts. First-page rankings typically come from persistent, strategic execution.
- Competition trying to take your place in the SERPs.
The more high-quality content you produce and the more high-quality links you build, the further you move from a pessimistic to an optimistic scenario.
As with pretty much all marketing strategies, there are basically two ways you can do SEO: DIY and outsourcing.
Do it yourself if you:
- Have a limited budget.
- Are patient with learning.
- Have time to invest.
Check out our free beginner-friendly SEO courses in Ahrefs Academy, covering everything from keyword research to link building.
Outsource to an agency or a freelancer if you:
- Have a high-value business.
- Need immediate results.
- Have a budget that allows expert intervention.
See how much you can expect to pay for SEO services.
I’m curious to hear your thoughts on the bot! Let me know on LinkedIn.
And here’s the prompt if you prefer to use it without the bot or with different LLMs (I tried it with Gemini and Claude).
Generate an SEO Potential Report
Create a file listing Parent Topics with columns for:
Difficulty: Categorized into four buckets: Easy (0-10), Medium (11-30), Hard (31-70), and Super Hard (71-100).
Traffic potential and Global traffic potential: Based on user-provided columns.
Estimated Traffic: Calculated for three ranking models:
Optimistic: 30% of keywords rank #1, 25% at #2, 20% at #3, 15% in positions 4-10, and 10% unranked.
Realistic: 20% at #1, 20% at #2, 30% at #3, 30% in positions 4-10, and 20% unranked.
Pessimistic: 10% at #1, 10% at #2, 20% at #3, 60% in positions 4-10, and 20% unranked.
CTR Assumptions:
Rank 1 = 30%, Rank 2 = 15%, Rank 3 = 10%, Ranks 4-10 = 5%, Unranked = 0%.
For each difficulty bucket, calculate:
Total keyword count.
Total traffic potential and Global traffic potential.
Estimated traffic for each ranking model.
Clean Data:
Remove any rows with an "Uncategorized" difficulty bucket.
Exclude rows where all values for traffic and potential traffic are zero.
Provide a summary row labeled “Sum”, aggregating totals for traffic potential, global traffic potential, and estimated traffic across all buckets.
Visualizations: Create two stacked bar charts:
1. Estimated Traffic Potential:
Each bar represents total Estimated Traffic Potential for a ranking model (Optimistic, Realistic, Pessimistic).
Stack the bar by difficulty bucket (Easy, Medium, Hard, Super Hard) to show the contribution of each bucket. The pessimistic scenario needs to be at the bottom.
2. Estimated Global Traffic Potential:
Each bar represents total Estimated Global Traffic Potential for a ranking model (Optimistic, Realistic, Pessimistic). The pessimistic scenario needs to be at the bottom.
Stack the bar by difficulty bucket (Easy, Medium, Hard, Super Hard) to show the contribution of each bucket.
Column Mapping:
If the exact column names cannot be found, ask the user to confirm which columns to use for Parent topic, Traffic potential, Global traffic potential, and Difficulty.
