Basics · also called free traffic, unpaid traffic
Organic traffic
Organic traffic is visitors who arrive at a website without the owner paying for an ad, for example from unpaid search results or a typed address.
Organic traffic is the visits a site earns rather than buys. Someone finds the page in the unpaid part of a SERP, follows a link from another site, opens a bookmark or types the address. No CPC is charged.
For an ordinary publisher, organic traffic is the prize, because revenue from it is nearly all margin. In search arbitrage it plays a smaller role. Most arbitrage pages are built for paid traffic and rank poorly in search engines. The classic organic model in this industry was direct navigation to a parked domain, where people typed a domain name and landed on a page of ads.
Organic traffic still matters as a benchmark. Google's rules for Related Search on Content expect a page reached through paid ads to be substantially the same as the page an organic visitor would see. Organic audiences are also shrinking for many sites as AI Overviews answer questions directly on the results page, a trend called zero-click search.
Think of it like this
Organic traffic is customers who walk into a shop because they know it or were told about it. Paid traffic is customers who came because of a leaflet you paid to hand out.
Related terms
Paid traffic
Paid traffic is visitors who reach a website because the site owner paid for an advertisement that brought them there.
Direct navigation (type-in traffic)
Direct navigation is reaching a website by typing its address into the browser bar instead of searching for it or clicking a link.
SERP (search engine results page)
A SERP is the page of results a search engine shows after someone types a query, mixing paid ads with unpaid listings.
Zero-click search
A zero-click search is a search where the user gets what they need on the results page itself and leaves without clicking any result or ad.
Traffic source
A traffic source is the platform or channel that visitors come from, such as Facebook ads, a native ad network or a search engine.
Sources: Google AdSense Help: AFS Product-Integrated Feature policies