What is Monthly traffic?
Short answer
An estimate of how many visits a website receives per month, usually from Similarweb or Ahrefs rather than the publisher’s own analytics.
Every public traffic figure is an estimate built from clickstream panels and search data. Two tools will disagree about the same site, sometimes by a factor of two.
What matters for a placement is the order of magnitude and the trend, not the exact number. A site at roughly a million visits is a different proposition from one at fifty thousand; the difference between 980,000 and 1,040,000 is noise.
Why it matters
Unlike Domain Rating, traffic is hard to fake with link building, which makes it the better sanity check on whether an outlet has real readers.