How to Export Traffic Trend Data from SEMrush

You’ve been watching SEMrush charts for weeks. The traffic trend is right there on your screen — dips, spikes, seasonal patterns. But a chart you can’t share, slice, or plug into your own reporting is just a pretty picture.

Exporting traffic trend data from SEMrush turns that visual into a working asset. You can track competitor movements over time, present findings to stakeholders, build dashboards, and identify the exact windows when your market is most active — or most vulnerable.

SEMrush holds data on 808 million domains and tracks over 25.6 billion keywords across 190+ countries. The question isn’t whether the data is there. The question is: are you actually pulling it out and using it?

This guide walks you through every method, every report type, and every format so you never leave actionable intelligence locked inside a dashboard again.

What Is Traffic Trend Data in SEMrush?

Traffic trend data in SEMrush refers to the historical and projected volume of organic, paid, and referral visits to any domain — yours or a competitor’s — tracked over a defined period.

SEMrush captures this data through multiple tools within its platform:

• Organic Research — shows estimated monthly organic traffic over time for any domain
• Traffic Analytics — provides visit estimates, engagement metrics, and channel breakdowns
• Keyword Overview — shows search volume trends for individual keywords
• Position Tracking — tracks SERP visibility trends for your targeted keywords
• Market Explorer — shows market-wide traffic share trends across competing domains

Each of these tools contains exportable trend data. Understanding which tool to use for which purpose is the first step to pulling the right export.

Why Exporting Traffic Trend Data Actually Matters

Most people look at SEMrush trends inside the tool and stop there. That’s a significant waste of what the platform offers.

Here’s what exporting unlocks:

Longitudinal analysis. SEMrush’s built-in charts are useful but limited. When you export data to a spreadsheet, you can run your own regression models, calculate month-over-month growth rates, and overlay multiple datasets that SEMrush doesn’t combine natively.

Stakeholder reporting. Executives and clients don’t live inside SEMrush. If you’re making the case for budget, headcount, or strategy shifts, you need data in a format people can read in a meeting — not a screenshot.

Competitive benchmarking. 73% of B2B marketers say competitive intelligence directly influenced a major strategic decision in the past year. Exported trend data lets you build comparison models that show exactly when a competitor started gaining ground and why.

Historical records. SEMrush updates its data continuously. If you don’t export, you lose the snapshot. A competitor’s traffic trend from six months ago may look completely different in the tool today as data gets recalibrated.

Custom dashboards. Tools like Google Data Studio, Tableau, and Power BI can ingest your exported CSVs and build live dashboards with far more customization than SEMrush’s native views.

How to Export Traffic Trend Data from SEMrush — Step by Step

Exporting Organic Traffic Trends via Organic Research

This is the most common export use case. Here’s how to do it:

Step 1 — Navigate to Organic Research

In the left-hand sidebar, go to Competitive Research → Organic Research. Enter the domain you want to analyze in the search bar and hit Enter.

Step 2 — Open the Overview tab

The Overview tab shows the main traffic trend graph at the top of the page. This is the historical organic traffic estimate for the domain.

Step 3 — Scroll to the data tables

Below the graph, SEMrush displays supporting data tables — top organic keywords, top pages, and position distribution. Each table has its own export button.

Step 4 — Click the Export button

Look for the Export button (or the download icon) in the top-right corner of each data widget. Click it to see format options.

Step 5 — Choose your export format

SEMrush offers exports in:

• CSV — best for spreadsheet analysis and custom dashboards
• XLSX — pre-formatted Excel file, useful for presentations
• PDF — useful for sharing snapshots with clients

For trend analysis, CSV is almost always the right choice. It gives you raw data you can manipulate without formatting constraints.

Step 6 — Set your date range before exporting

This step trips up a lot of people. The export will reflect whatever date range is currently selected in the tool. Before clicking Export, make sure you’ve set the time range to cover the period you actually want — this can go back up to 5 years of historical data on higher-tier plans.

Click the date range dropdown near the top of the graph, select your period, and then export.

Exporting Traffic Trend Data via Traffic Analytics

Traffic Analytics gives you a more granular breakdown than Organic Research — it covers all traffic channels, not just organic.

Step 1 — Go to Traffic Analytics

Navigate to Competitive Research → Traffic Analytics. Enter the target domain.

Step 2 — Select the Overview tab

The Overview shows total visit trends, unique visitors, pages per visit, average visit duration, and bounce rate — all over time.

Step 3 — Use the Bulk Export option for multiple domains

One of Traffic Analytics’ most powerful features is multi-domain comparison. You can add up to 5 competing domains in the same view and export all of their trend data simultaneously.

Click Add up to 4 competitors at the top of the page, enter competitor URLs, and then use the export function to download a combined CSV.

Step 4 — Export specific channel breakdown data

Under the Traffic Journey and Channels tabs, you’ll find channel-specific trend data — direct, referral, search, social, paid. Each sub-report has its own export function. Export these separately if you need channel-level trend analysis.

Exporting Keyword Volume Trends

If you want to export trend data for specific keywords — not domains — use the Keyword Overview or Keyword Magic Tool.

Step 1 — Go to Keyword Overview

Enter a keyword. The tool displays a trend graph showing monthly search volume over the past 12 months.

Step 2 — Export from the Keyword Magic Tool for bulk exports

For bulk keyword trend exports, the Keyword Magic Tool is more practical. Enter a seed keyword, apply filters (volume, intent, difficulty), and use the Export button to download up to 10,000 keywords at a time with their monthly volume trends as separate columns.

Each exported row includes monthly search volume data across the trailing 12 months — making it easy to spot seasonal patterns at scale.

Exporting Position Tracking Trends

Position Tracking shows how your site’s average SERP position has moved over time for a tracked keyword set.

Step 1 — Go to Position Tracking

Navigate to SEO → Position Tracking. Select your project.

Step 2 — Go to the Overview or Rankings tabs

The Overview tab shows your Visibility Score trend, Estimated Traffic trend, and Average Position trend. The Rankings tab shows individual keyword position histories.

Step 3 — Export

Use the export icon at the top right of each report. For historical position data, select a date range that covers the period you want and export as CSV.

Note: Position Tracking exports are project-specific. You can only export trend data for domains and keywords you’ve set up in a project. You cannot export competitor position trends through this tool — use Organic Research or Traffic Analytics for that.

Exporting Market Explorer Trends

Market Explorer is the right tool when you want industry-level traffic share trends — not just individual domain data.

Step 1 — Navigate to Market Explorer

Go to Competitive Research → Market Explorer. Enter a seed domain to auto-generate your competitive landscape, or build a custom market by entering specific domains.

Step 2 — Review the Growth Quadrant and Traffic Share data

The Trending section shows month-over-month traffic share shifts across the entire market. The All Domains table shows each player’s estimated visits with trend indicators.

Step 3 — Export the All Domains report

Click Export on the All Domains table. This gives you a CSV of all tracked domains with their traffic estimates — useful for building competitive positioning maps.

For the Market Trends graph itself (showing total market traffic over time), click the export button in the top-right corner of the graph widget.

Types of Traffic Trend Exports and What Each One Is Good For

How to Work With Exported SEMrush Trend Data

Getting the export is step one. What you do with it determines whether it creates value.

Clean the data first. SEMrush CSVs often include header rows, summary rows, and metadata that can confuse spreadsheet formulas. Delete anything above and below the actual data table before building any calculations.

Create a date column if one isn’t present. Some exports include a “Month” column formatted as a period (e.g., “Jan 2024”) rather than a sortable date. Convert this to a proper date format so you can sort and filter reliably.

Build a rolling 12-month average. Single-month traffic numbers are noisy. A rolling average smooths out anomalies and shows true directional momentum. In Excel or Google Sheets, use a simple AVERAGE formula across a trailing 12-row window.

Index traffic to a baseline. Rather than comparing raw traffic numbers across different-sized competitors, index everyone to 100 at a common starting point. This shows relative growth rate — which is far more meaningful than absolute volume when domains are different sizes.

Look for inflection points, not just trends. Steady growth or decline is interesting. Sudden inflection points — months where a competitor’s traffic jumps or drops sharply — are where the real intelligence lives. Find those points, then investigate what happened: a new content push, a Google algorithm update, a PR event, a product launch.

Overlay your own data. Import your exported SEMrush trend data alongside your actual analytics data (from Google Analytics or your own platform). The comparison between estimated and actual traffic tells you how accurately SEMrush is modeling your site — and gives context to the competitor estimates.

Common Mistakes That Waste Exported Data

Exporting without setting the date range. The default view in many SEMrush reports is the last 12 months. If you need 3 years of trend data, you must manually adjust the date range before exporting. Otherwise you get a partial picture.

Only exporting organic traffic. Organic traffic typically represents 53% of total website traffic, but that means nearly half is coming from other channels. For a complete trend picture, export Traffic Analytics data alongside Organic Research data.

Ignoring database selection. SEMrush maintains separate keyword and traffic databases for each country. If you’re analyzing a U.S.-focused competitor but leave the database set to “Global,” your numbers will be skewed. Always confirm the correct regional database is selected before exporting.

Treating estimates as exact figures. SEMrush traffic data is modeled from clickstream data, keyword rankings, and historical patterns. It correlates strongly with actual traffic but is not the same as first-party analytics data. Use it for directional signals and relative comparisons, not for absolute traffic counts in financial models.

Not versioning your exports. SEMrush recalibrates historical data periodically as their models improve. An export from today may look slightly different from an export of the “same” data in six months. Save and date-stamp your exports so you have a consistent historical record.

Exporting too much at once. Bulk exports are tempting but often create bloated files that are hard to work with. Export the minimum date range and keyword set you actually need for the specific analysis at hand.

How Frequently Should You Export Traffic Trend Data?

The right cadence depends on your use case:

• Monthly exports work well for ongoing competitive monitoring. Run a consistent export on the same day each month so you build a clean time series.
• Quarterly exports make sense for strategic reviews and market analysis. Pull a full-year export at the end of each quarter to feed into planning cycles.
• Event-triggered exports are valuable after major events — Google algorithm updates, competitor funding announcements, product launches, or significant shifts you notice in the tool. Capture the snapshot immediately so you have a pre/post comparison.

Automating exports is possible through SEMrush’s API (available on Business and custom plans), which lets you programmatically pull traffic trend data into your own systems on a schedule. For teams doing this at scale, the API eliminates the manual export process entirely.

Conclusion

Exporting traffic trend data from SEMrush is one of those skills that pays compound returns. The first export gives you a snapshot. Consistent exports over months and years give you a competitive intelligence archive that almost no one else in your market has.

The process itself is straightforward once you know which tool maps to which use case. Use Organic Research for domain-level SEO trends. Use Traffic Analytics for full-channel competitive data. Use Keyword Magic Tool for keyword seasonality. Use Market Explorer when you need an industry-wide perspective. Always set your date range before exporting, always save and version your files, and always treat the numbers as directional signals rather than exact counts.

The companies that build systematic processes around this kind of data — rather than checking charts occasionally and moving on — are the ones that consistently spot opportunities before their competitors do.

Traffic intelligence tells you where the market is moving. What you do with that intelligence — specifically, whether you act on it faster than everyone else — is what determines whether it translates into growth.