No, X Isn’t Seeing ‘All Time High’ Traffic

Whether or not Elon Musk’s X (previously Twitter) venture is performing nice or not, X is doing itself no favors with its repeated amplification of deceptive, and/or incorrect, stats.

In the present day, Elon Musk pinned this submit on his timeline, which purportedly exhibits that X is reaching new highs in site visitors.

However that’s not what this chart signifies.

First off, the chart, which has been sourced from search engine marketing administration platform SEMRush, shows web site site visitors solely, and doesn’t embody app utilization. Round 80% of X’s utilization comes through the app, so that is solely a minor fraction of X’s total utilization knowledge, primarily based particularly on visits to www.x.com (or www.twitter.com).

So it’s not indicative of total site visitors, and/or utilization of the app.

However the greater query about this chart, in fact, is why X noticed such a large spike in site visitors in April final yr?

As I’ve lined beforehand, natural site visitors to www.twitter.com, primarily based on SEMRush’s knowledge, went from round a billion per day, on common, up until April fifth 2023, to greater than 2 billion simply two days later, on April seventh. Since then it’s continued to extend, and is now as much as a median of round 3 billion per day.

However nothing particular occurred in April final yr. So why the leap?

I requested SEMRush, and this was their clarification:

“Upon reviewing the report, there seems to be a misunderstanding in regards to the natural site visitors values. The spike noticed within the knowledge corresponds with an replace we carried out. This replace, executed on April sixth, resulted in further knowledge being integrated into our metrics (that’s the SERP Options). Consequently, this led to spikes in figures in our toolkit throughout all web sites, not completely Twitter.”

In different phrases, SEMRush modified its reporting methodology to incorporate SERP Options, the breakout panels in Google Search that present, amongst different issues, X posts associated to your search time period.

Which, in fact, benefited X’s site visitors numbers considerably.

“The exceptional enhance in site visitors statistics you noticed and are referring to displays a big replace in our knowledge assortment methodology at SEMRush […] A good portion of the noticed site visitors enhance, particularly for domains like Twitter.com, could be attributed to the inclusion of Twitter SERP Options in our monitoring.”

So the leap in April final yr shouldn’t be reflective of a site visitors enhance for X in any respect, and is sort of fully linked to this replace.

Which can be why this report doesn’t align with different third get together reviews that we’ve reported on, together with:

Apptopia’s report, launched in October final yr, which confirmed that X has seen a 13% decline in each day lively customers since Musk took over on the app.
SimilarWeb, which reported that X has seen a 14% decline in cell and internet visits since September 2022.
AppAnnie’s 2023 “State of Cellular” report, which discovered that X’s month-to-month lively person rely declined considerably between 2022 and 2023.
Sensor Tower’s current replace, which confirmed that X utilization has declined 18% year-over-year
Edison Analysis’s Infinite Dial report for 2023, which signifies that X has seen a 30% decline in utilization, primarily based on person surveys.

Certainly, X itself reported in November 2022 that it had 250 million each day lively customers, which is the very same quantity it reported once more this month, which means that it isn’t seeing any main spike in utilization.

It’s not essentially shedding site visitors both, primarily based on this. However the concept that X may have one way or the other tripled its internet site visitors, and maintained the very same quantity of total customers appears implausible.

Except a heap of individuals stopped utilizing the cell app, and began utilizing it on internet as an alternative. Which appears equally uncertain.

Primarily, the chart that Elon is amplifying doesn’t exhibit the fast progress that he’s suggesting. It simply raises extra questions on all the info that X shares, and the accuracy of its reporting, versus showcasing its success.