exit rate
Also called: page exit rate, exit percentage
Exit rate is the percentage of pageviews for a given page that were the last in the session, meaning the visitor left your site from that page. It is calculated as exits divided by pageviews for that page, no matter how the visitor first entered the site.
Exit rate answers a narrow question: of everyone who viewed a page, what share left the site right after? It counts the page as the final step in the session, regardless of how the visitor arrived or how many pages they saw first. The formula is exits / pageviews for that page.
Exit rate vs bounce rate
The two get confused constantly. Bounce rate only looks at sessions that started on a page and contained nothing else. Exit rate looks at every session that touched the page and asks whether it was the last page seen. Every bounce is an exit, but most exits are not bounces.
One catch for 2026: Universal Analytics, which reported exit rate as a standard metric, stopped processing data in 2023. GA4 does not ship exit rate out of the box. You rebuild it in an Explore report by putting Exits and Views side by side per page and dividing.
Read the number in context. A high exit rate on a thank-you page or an order confirmation is normal, since those pages are meant to end a visit. A high exit rate on a category page, a comparison page, or a mid-funnel article is a warning sign: the page is not handing visitors to the next step you intended, whether that is a deeper page, a form, or a checkout.
How it affects your traffic
For an SEO program, exit rate flags where organic traffic quietly leaks. When a page built to move visitors deeper (a service overview, a comparison, a mid-funnel guide) shows a high exit rate, it usually means the content answered a different intent than the path you planned, or the next step is not obvious enough. Left unchecked, those pages absorb rankings and clicks without feeding your conversion path. An SEO audit cross-references exit rate against search intent and internal linking to pinpoint which pages bleed sessions and why.
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