Estimate Your SEO Potential With This Free ChatGPT Bot

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.

here.

The bot works best with Ahrefs data since it relies on traffic potential and parent topics (more about them in a bit). But if you’re not an Ahrefs user, the bot can use regular keywords instead of parent topics and regular search volume instead of traffic potential. It will also handle copy-paste data from our Free Keywords Generator.

It produces a spreadsheet with traffic estimations you can download in CSV format. You also get visualizations of traffic potential (in the country you selected in Keywords Explorer) and global traffic in the form of stacked bar charts, which you can also download.

Keep in mind that the traffic is expressed as visits (not visitors) you could potentially get each month.

Here’s an example.

The higher the difficulty, the more time and effort you’ll need to rank. The “easy” bucket shows how much traffic you can likely get in the short term — a good target, especially for sites with low domain rating.

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.

Creating parent topic clusters in Keywords Explorer.

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.

Extracting competitors' keywords for the bot.

Plug them into Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer to get parent topics and traffic potential data.

Generating parent topics from competitors' keywords.

Finally, export the data and give it to the bot.

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.

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.

Extracting target keywords from Rank Tracker.

For example, this site could get the highest traffic lift by focusing on the easiest keywords.

Example estimation based on target 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).

Using chatgpt to find keywords with most potential for improvement.

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.

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.