The UK’s fastest shrinking care directory website?

An analysis of Ahrefs’ data suggests a sharp decline in organic traffic for Lottie.org

Lottie don't appear to have updated their graph comparing Lottie's organic traffic growth with other care directories on the Partner with Lottie page since 2024, and we wondered “What might that chart look like today?”

Note: Lottie have now removed their original graph, the link here will download a copy of their Partner with Lottie page at the time of the article being published.

A graph comparing Lottie.org's website traffic compared to other care directories over the past 12 months
Traffic data sourced from Ahrefs. * 37,719 visits in October 2025. ^ peak reported as 248,089 visits in April 2024

Sourcing traffic data

We don't have access to Lottie's actual traffic data, and so instead we're using the Ahrefs traffic estimates, as Lottie also references Ahrefs as the source of traffic data on their graph.

Missing a directory

Lottie don't include traffic estimates for carehome.co.uk on their graph, which is useful for us because according to Ahrefs in October carehome.co.uk received 571k organic website visitors (over 15 times the Ahrefs estimate for Lottie.org) and that wouldn’t fit on our new graph.

A (not so) small discrepancy in the figures

According to Ahrefs, Lottie.org has never received the 600k+ monthly organic website visitors as reported on their graph. Ahrefs suggests a peak of 284k visitors in April 2024.

One possible explanation for this is that Lottie are reporting traffic data from a more accurate source, for example Google Analytics, but using Ahrefs estimates for competitors (on review, the competitor figures shown on the original graph do align with figures from Ahrefs).

How accurate are Ahrefs' estimates

Ahrefs themselves stated in an article in 2022 that...

In our studied sample of 1,635 websites, the median deviation turned out to be 49.52%. In other words, most of the time you can expect Ahrefs to misreport a website’s U.S. traffic by up to half of its value.

Tim Souls, Ahrefs - May 3, 2022

It's important here to note that Ahrefs state this figure relates to US traffic; it's likely this deviation percentage would be different for UK traffic.

A median deviation of 49.52% leaves plenty of room for error. For a site with 100,000 monthly visits, half the time Ahrefs' estimate will typically fall somewhere between about 50,000 and 150,000 — the other half of the time they will be even further out.

So it's possible, though not typical, that Ahrefs underestimated Lottie's traffic by 316k visitors in a given month. Whether this is the cause of the discrepancy between Lottie's 600k vs. Ahrefs' 284k monthly peak organic visitor figures we can't say with any certainty.

Comparing traffic

As it turns out, this isn't a problem for comparisons. Ahrefs is consistent in its inaccuracy when estimating traffic, especially for websites within the same sector. Even though Ahrefs' traffic estimates aren't especially accurate, they correlate strongly with actual data, making them useful for relative comparisons between sites.

What we can't do is compare data from two different sources with different levels of accuracy. For example, using Google Analytics (which would be close to 100% accurate) to measure Lottie's website traffic, and then Ahrefs (with 49.52% median deviation) to estimate traffic for other care directory websites, wouldn't make for a fair comparison. At least, not without adjusting for the difference in accuracy (something Ahrefs actually propose a workaround for in the same article).

However, since our source of traffic estimates for all the care directories in the new graph is Ahrefs, the performance comparison between directories should still be accurate, particularly when assessing Lottie's position relative to competitors and the percentage drop in traffic. The visitor numbers themselves, however, should be taken with a large pinch of salt for all of the care directories.

Summary

Two years ago, Lottie’s exponential traffic growth looked unstoppable as it closed in on carehome.co.uk to become the most visited care directory in the UK. Yet just as its rise was meteoric, so too, it appears, has been its fall. Eighteen months after that peak, third-party data from Ahrefs shows an 87% decline in estimated organic traffic — leaving open the question of what caused the drop and whether it has now levelled off.

References