Domain Overview

Summary#

Domain Overview is the flagship report. Give it one domain and it returns that site's whole search position in a single screen: authority, organic traffic and its trend, ranking keywords, backlinks, top pages, main competitors, country split and AI-search citations.

Purpose#

Before you compete with a site, pitch a client, buy a domain or set a target, you need one honest picture of where that domain stands. Scattered across six tools that answer takes twenty minutes. Domain Overview exists so it takes one run.

It answers a single decision: is this domain strong, in which areas, and where is it moving? Everything else in the Competitors & Backlinks section drills into one slice of what this report shows you.

Overview#

You type a domain. Metric Vault queries DataForSEO's Labs, backlink and SERP endpoints in parallel — rank overview, ranked keywords, competitors, relevant pages, subdomains, backlink summary, anchors, backlink history and 60 months of historical rank — then runs the same rank query across 21 country markets to build the geographic split.

The measured numbers are shown to you directly. There is no AI rewrite of the figures, so what you read is what the provider measured. Two parts arrive after the main report renders: the Google Lighthouse scores in Site Health Snapshot and the AI SEARCH card, which queries Perplexity live for citations. Both fill in a few seconds later; heavy sites would otherwise push the run past its time budget.

Benefits#

• One run replaces a rank check, a traffic estimate, a backlink check, a competitor lookup and a top-pages export.
• Twelve months of traffic history and 60 months of rank history, so you see direction rather than a snapshot.
• A 21-country breakdown, which tells you whether a domain is global or one market deep.
• SEO and AI-search visibility side by side, in the same report.
• Every figure is measured, not generated. Where there is no data, the report says so.

Use Cases#

• Sizing a competitor. You are about to target a rival's category. Run their domain and you learn whether their strength is links, keyword breadth or one large market.
• Qualifying a prospect. An agency needs a fast, credible read before a pitch. The report gives you authority, traffic trend and the top pages worth discussing.
• Checking your own health. Run your domain monthly and watch the traffic trend, position distribution and referring domains move.
• Vetting a domain purchase. Authority, backlink history and anchor text tell you whether a domain's strength is real or inflated.
• Finding who you actually compete with. Main Organic Competitors is built from shared rankings, not from your assumptions. Switch it to Business to drop the publishers that share those rankings without competing for the sale.

The three competitor views#

"Competitor" means two different things, and the card now asks which one you want. The switch above the table remembers your choice.

Keyword overlap is what the data provider returns and what this card always showed: the domains ranking for the most of the same terms you do, ordered by how much of your keyword set they share. It is the honest answer to "who shows up where I show up", and it is often not a list of rivals. Running it on a consumer hardware brand returns Best Buy and Walmart, which are real competitors, alongside CNET, PCMag, The New York Times and WIRED, which are reviewing the category rather than selling in it.

Business is the same list with publishers, news sites and reference sites removed. Use it when you want the companies you lose a sale to. The note under the switch says how many rows it hid.

My list is your own, and it wins. It is the same saved set as Competitor Manager, so anything you pin here appears there and anything you add there appears here. A pinned domain is listed even when it is not in the overlap response at all, marked Not in this result, because a competitor you named is still a competitor whether or not it shares your keywords.

Why Business is a list and not a category#

The provider returns no category for a domain. A competitor record carries the domain, how many keywords it shares, its average position and its traffic metrics, and nothing that names an industry or a site type. The one endpoint that does return categories classifies what a domain ranks for rather than what the business is, and gives CNET and a hardware maker the same category, because they cover the same subject.

So the exclusion is a maintained list of publishers, and a maintained list is always incomplete. A trade publication in a narrow niche will not be on it. That is what pinning is for: when the Business view gets it wrong, pin the domains you care about and use My list.

Requirements#

• A signed-in Metric Vault account.
• A paid plan. Domain Overview is a premium tool and is not available on Free.
• At least 6 credits of your monthly allowance remaining.
• A public domain to analyze. No verification or integration is needed — you can run any domain, not only your own.

Permissions#

Any member of a workspace can run it; there is no per-role restriction. Access is decided by plan.

See Roles and what each can do for what roles change elsewhere.

Cost#

6 credits per run — the highest single-tool cost in the product, because one run fires more provider calls than any other tool.

A cached result still charges. If another customer ran the same domain with the same country and range in the last 10 days, you get their stored data instantly and are still billed 6 credits. Reopening your own saved result from the "You already ran this" prompt or from Saved Work costs nothing. See How credits work and Result caching and freshness.

See example renders a stored sample report and charges nothing.

Navigation Path#

Dashboard → Competitors & Backlinks → Domain Overview

Inputs#

See Common inputs and validation for the shared input rules.

Step-by-Step Guide#

1. Open Dashboard → Competitors & Backlinks → Domain Overview.
2. Set the country and range in the topbar if you need something other than United States and the last 30 days.
3. Type the domain into the field marked e.g. nike.com.
4. Press Analyze Domain · 6 reports, or press Enter in the field.
5. If you have run this domain before, choose Open saved result (free) or Run fresh (6 credits) in the dialog.
6. Wait for Analyzing… this can take a few seconds for live data. to clear.
7. Read the report, then use the export row or Get recommendations.

To see the output shape first, press See example instead. It renders a real stored report with a Sample preview. banner and spends nothing.

Reading the Results#

What this means for <domain> opens the report: a short list of plain findings, followed by Recommended action plan when the run produced one. Read this first — it is the summary of everything below.

The AI SEARCH card is the left panel of the dual header. AI Search Visibility is scored out of 100 and is the share of Perplexity queries that returned citations for the domain. Beneath it sit Citation hits, Cited sources and Self-citations — how many citations were seen, how many distinct domains were cited, and how many of those were the domain itself. A high citation count with zero self-citations means the topic is being answered by AI and someone else is the source. View full AI Visibility opens the dedicated tool.

The SEO overview KPIs carry the core numbers: Authority Score, Organic Traffic, Organic Keywords, Backlinks, Paid Keywords, Paid Traffic and Year-over-Year Growth.

Organic Traffic is one month. It is the most recent month the provider has measured, and it stays that number whatever the Range control is set to. The history behind it is the traffic trend chart beside the KPIs, which is what the Range control moves. Earlier versions replaced the figure with the sum of every month in the selected range, so a 12-month range showed roughly twelve times a month's traffic beneath a label reading Monthly. Nothing is added up now.

Authority Score, Organic Traffic, Organic Keywords, Backlinks and Referring Domains all come from one shared service, cached per domain per day, so Domain Overview and the Chrome extension's Quick Preview report the same numbers for the same domain on the same day. They used to derive them separately and could disagree. Organic Keywords is counted in the United States index. Authority Score is banded automatically — 80 and above reads Industry leader, 60 and above Strong, 40 and above Growing, below that Emerging. Treat authority as relative: it is only meaningful next to the competitors listed further down. Year-over-year growth is the number to act on. Traffic falling while keyword count rises means the domain is adding low-value rankings.

Traffic Trend (12M) is the shape of the last twelve months. A steady line is health, a step change is usually a site migration or an algorithm update, and a slow decline is content decay. Keyword Position History and Position Distribution tell you whether rankings are concentrated in the top three or sitting on page two. A large page-two bucket is the cheapest opportunity in the whole report: those pages already rank and only need improvement.

Intent Mix splits the keyword base into informational, commercial, transactional and navigational. A profile that is almost entirely informational gets traffic but few sales. Traffic Sources shows where visits come from.

Traffic by Country and Distribution by Country come from the 21-market fan-out. If one country holds nearly all the traffic, the domain is a local player with a global-looking brand — useful when deciding whether it really competes with you.

Top Organic Keywords and Top Pages by Traffic are the evidence tables. Read the top pages first: they tell you what the domain is actually known for, which is often not what its homepage claims.

Main Organic Competitors lists domains that rank for the same terms, with their overlap. Take the ones with high overlap and lower authority — those are the rankings you can realistically take. Feed them straight into Competitor Battle or save them with Competitor Manager.

Top Subdomains matters for large sites: if a support subdomain carries most of the traffic, the commercial pages are weaker than the headline number suggests. When there is nothing to show it reads No subdomain data available.

SERP Features Triggered and Branded SERP Ownership show which result types the domain wins and how much of its own branded results page it controls. Owned slots below 50% means competitors and marketplaces are taking your brand's own search results.

Anchor Text Breakdown and Top Cited Sources preview the link and citation profile; Backlink Profile is the full version.

Site Health Snapshot arrives last and holds Mobile PageSpeed, Desktop PageSpeed, Health Score and Critical issues, marked Real Google Lighthouse score. Mobile below 50 is a genuine ranking risk.

Related Topics To Target and How you compare to your industry close the report with the expansion opportunities and a peer comparison.

If the provider has nothing for your query, you get an honest empty result rather than an invented one. See A tool returned no data.

Examples#

Screenshots#

 chart and the Position Distribution chart side by side.)

Tips#

• Run See example before your first real run. It costs nothing and shows the full report shape.
• Set the range to 12m when you care about direction and 30d when you care about the current position.
• Run your own domain and your closest competitor back to back, then compare the Position Distribution charts. The gap is your work queue.
• Use Bulk Analysis when you need Domain Overview across several domains at once. See Bulk Analysis.
• Save the competitors you find into the vault so the next battle takes one click. See Competitor Manager.

Best Practices#

• Re-run monthly, not weekly. The shared cache holds this data for 10 days, and search metrics do not move meaningfully in seven days.
• Always read Top Pages before Top Keywords. Pages tell you strategy; keywords tell you tactics.
• Compare authority scores only between domains in the same industry.
• Check the country split before assuming a competitor is national.
• Turn the findings into a plan with Get recommendations. The plan is generated once per domain per day and shared with the Quick Preview, so opening either screen again that day shows the same plan without charging again. See Get Recommendations.

Common Mistakes#

• Treating Authority Score as a Google metric. It is a provider score derived from the link graph, not something Google publishes.
• Reading organic traffic as exact visits. It is a modelled estimate from rankings and search volume. Use it to compare domains, not to forecast revenue.
• Changing the country and expecting a free re-run. A different country is a different run and charges 6 credits again.
• Running the same domain repeatedly in a day. The data will not have changed, and each fresh run costs 6 credits. Open the saved result instead.
• Ignoring the empty state. If it says no measured data was found, the provider genuinely has nothing — usually a very new or very small domain.

Limitations#

• Traffic, authority and keyword counts are provider estimates, not analytics. Only Google Search Console reports your true traffic.
• The country breakdown covers 21 markets. A country outside that set will not appear.
• Top keywords, top pages, competitors and subdomains are capped lists, not full exports.
• Lighthouse scores and AI-search citations render after the main report and can fail independently without failing the run.
• The report describes a domain, not a single page.

Troubleshooting#

FAQs#

Can I run a domain I do not own? Yes. Domain Overview works on any public domain and needs no verification or connected account. That is the point of it.

Why does it cost 6 credits when other tools cost 1? Because one run makes far more provider calls than any other tool — rank data, backlinks, keywords, competitors, pages, subdomains, history and a 21-country sweep. The price reflects the real cost of the run.

Is the organic traffic figure my real traffic? No. It is a modelled estimate built from your rankings and the search volume behind them. Use it to compare domains over time. For real numbers, connect Google Search Console. See Google Search Console.

Why did my second run return in under a second? A cache hit. The same domain with the same country and range is served from stored data for up to 10 days. It still charges 6 credits, because the credit pays for the report, not for the provider call. See Result caching and freshness.

Does the AI SEARCH card work if I only care about classic SEO? You can ignore it. It measures citations in AI answers, which is a different channel from rankings. If you do care, Visibility Overview measures it properly across several engines.