A Word Counting Tool Gets More Traffic Than Most VC-Funded Startups

I loved auditing & documenting the SEO growth of Word Counter. Considering how simple the idea is, the site was getting 28.5 million visitors every month till January 2024. At present, the traffic is between 9-11 million visitors a month.

This is more than several startups that are VC-funded, world-class resources & with groundbreaking ideas combined.

I had to verify the numbers from Semrush, Ahrefs, Similarweb & Ubersuggest.

Ubersuggest & Similarweb had the closest numbers. So for this post, I will use Ubersuggest to decode Word Counter’s SEO growth.

Let’s dive deep into what worked for Word Counter.

Business Model

Word Counter runs a free online tool that counts words, characters, and analyzes text for users like students and writers.

The business makes money mainly through display advertising, using networks like Google AdSense and AdThrive.

There’s also some affiliate income, such as partnerships with Grammarly.

The focus is on driving high organic search traffic, keeping the service free, and monetizing the massive organic traffic with ads and occasional affiliate links.

SEO Lessons To Learn From Word Counter:

#1 On-Page SEO:

SEO experts have been advising lately that creating a free tool can be super beneficial to build irreplaceable backlinks, increase domain authority & grow organic traffic.

Word counter did this in 2010. Top top-ranking & most-visited pages on Word Counter are free tools and not the content pages.

This is true for almost all the countries where Word Counter is getting traffic from.

I liked how relevant the content is created to subtly promote all the various tools under Word Counter.

For example, this post on - Alphabetical List of US States.

Perfect opportunity to introduce the suite of tools for the person searching for “Alphabetical list of US States.“

This can be done for all countries, and there could be endless variations of content ideas around the language of English.

There is also content around grammar that most people face issues with. Here’s an example of the difference between Each Others’ & Each Other’s & Further away vs Farther away.

The content coverage on the blog section is mind-blowing and justifies the massive traffic this simple tool is enjoying.

I’ve checked multiple tools, and there are reports of massive traffic loss. This could mainly be due to AI overviews.

There’s nothing to worry about, at least not if you understand the search intent of your end users.

Google filed a patent in 2020 around information gain. AI overviews are hallucinating a lot, people don’t take the AI overviews seriously.

AI overviews in the search results page are limited. If you’re afraid the end users might get information from AI overviews, you should know that Generative AI is too expensive to be served for free to users on SERPs & AI search results are limited in number.

Here’s an AI-proof content strategy tip:

1. Build link-worthy assets that AI search can refer to: Check out this post on Word Counter that Mashable has linked to. (anchor text: contains 1,084,170 words)

#2 Off-Page SEO:

I’m impressed. Really.

A simple word-counting tool, having over 200k backlinks, is unbelievable. Especially in 2025.

Several startups that have everything at their disposal don’t have 200k organic visitors, let alone backlinks.

Word counter has backlinks from The Guardian, HubSpot, Namcheap, Mashable & more.

Mind you, these are all Do-Follow links, that is, SEO value passes through from the above mentioned pages to Word Counter.

This is kinda big deal from the search engines’ point of view. Do-follow links are highly valuable.

#3 Technical SEO:

Apart from solid core web vitals (just on desktop), there’s little to nothing done on Technical SEO grounds, especially schema (my favourite form of technical SEO)

Suggested schema markups:

1. SoftwareApplication - This tells the search what the tool is about and hence finds the right users algorithmically.

2. BlogPosting - This is useful to tell search engines about blog posts published on Word Counter.

Areas Of Improvement & Business Lessons:

#1 Update URL structure: It’s 2025, and such URL structures are nothing but a huge mistake. A simple, easy-to-read structure is always a great user experience. Not everything has to be for search engines. After all, search engines aren’t going to consume the blog posts and share them with the needful users.

#2 Address declining traffic: From 28.2M in Jan’24 to 11.7M in Apr’25, the traffic decline is real, almost a 100% loss in traffic.

#3 Expand related tools: Creating more tools can really help with various usecases for new users & requirements.

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