In November 2024, Google.com was the most popular website worldwide with 136 billion average monthly visits. The online platform has held the top spot as the most popular website since June 2010, when it pulled ahead of Yahoo into first place. Second-ranked YouTube generated more than 72.8 billion monthly visits in the measured period. The internet leaders: search, social, and e-commerce Social networks, search engines, and e-commerce websites shape the online experience as we know it. While Google leads the global online search market by far, YouTube and Facebook have become the world’s most popular websites for user generated content, solidifying Alphabet’s and Meta’s leadership over the online landscape. Meanwhile, websites such as Amazon and eBay generate millions in profits from the sale and distribution of goods, making the e-market sector an integral part of the global retail scene. What is next for online content? Powering social media and websites like Reddit and Wikipedia, user-generated content keeps moving the internet’s engines. However, the rise of generative artificial intelligence will bring significant changes to how online content is produced and handled. ChatGPT is already transforming how online search is performed, and news of Google's 2024 deal for licensing Reddit content to train large language models (LLMs) signal that the internet is likely to go through a new revolution. While AI's impact on the online market might bring both opportunities and challenges, effective content management will remain crucial for profitability on the web.

In November 2024, Google.com was the most popular website worldwide with approximately 6.25 billion unique monthly visitors. YouTube.com was ranked second with an estimated 3.64 billion unique monthly visitors. Both websites are among the most visited websites worldwide.

In November 2024, Google.com was the most visited website in the United States, with over 25 billion total visits. YouTube.com came in second with 12 billion total visits. Reddit.com and Amazon.com counted approximately 3.12 billion and 2.89 monthly visits each from U.S. online audiences.

In August 2023, espn.com was the most visited sports website worldwide. The famous sports channel recorded 415.5 million online visits that month. Meanwhile, marca.com placed second in the ranking with 374.5 million visits.

In November 2024, Google.com was the leading website in the United Kingdom with more than 4.16 billion monthly visits. The search engine was also popular in its UK top-level domain, with Google.co.uk reaching 267 million views and placing tenth in the ranking. YouTube and Facebook were the most visited social media platforms, ranking as the second and fifth most visited websites in the country.

In November 2024, WhatsApp.com was the most engaging website worldwide, with users spending approximately 31 minutes and 17 seconds per visit on the website. YouTube.com was second in user engagement, with an average visit duration of 22 minutes and 24 minutes and 15 seconds. X.com, which ranks as the tenth most visited website worldwide, reported an average session length of 15 minutes and 26 seconds.

In May 2023, 75 percent of Italy's digital audience browsed search engines. Internet tools and web services followed in the ranking with 71.5 percent. The penetration rate of video and movie content on the internet was over nearly 70 percent. On this category of websites, each Italian user spent on average almost six hours in February 2022.

Digital population in Italy In January 2022, Italy counted a digital population of 50.85 million internet users, with over 40 million social media users. Between 2014 and 2020, the share of internet users in Italy surfing daily experienced a constant increase, reaching almost eight in 10 users in 2020.

Instant messaging platforms in Italy

In February 2022, Telegram was the most downloaded communication app from Android users in Italy, with 328 thousand downloads. In 2021, WhatsApp was also among the most used social platforms in Italy, counting approximately 37 million users in the country. As of the third quarter of 2021, Italy was among the countries worldwide with the highest monthly usage of the popular chat app.

In May 2025, booking.com was the most visited travel and tourism website worldwide. That month, Booking’s web page recorded around *** million visits. Tripadvisor.com and airbnb.com followed in the ranking, with roughly *** million and ** million visits, respectively. Popular online travel agencies in the U.S. Online travel agencies (OTAs), such as Booking.com and Expedia, offer a wide variety of services, including online hotel bookings, flight reservations, and car rentals. According to the Statista Consumer Insights Global survey, when looking at flight search engine online bookings by brand in the United States, Booking.com and Expedia were the most popular options when it came to making online flight reservations in 2025. When focusing on hotel and private accommodation online bookings in the U.S., Booking.com was again the most popular brand, followed by Airbnb, Expedia, and Hotels.com. Booking Holdings vs. Expedia Group Booking.com is one of the most popular sites of the online travel group Booking Holdings, the leading online travel agency worldwide based on revenue, that also owns brands like Priceline, Kayak, and Agoda. In 2024, Booking Holdings' revenue amounted to almost ** billion U.S. dollars, the highest figure reported by the company to date. Meanwhile, global revenue of Expedia Group, which manages brands like Expedia, Hotels.com, and Vrbo, reached nearly ** billion U.S. dollars that year.

Google.com recorded an average monthly traffic of 4.79 billion visits in Japan from September to November 2024, which made it the most visited website. It was followed by Yahoo.co.jp and Youtube.com.

In August 2023, cvs.com ranked as the most visited pharmacy website worldwide, with around 78.3 million monthly visits. Drugs.com came in second place, as the U.S.-based pharmacy website amassed 32 million visits. Russia's most popular online pharmacy, apteka.ru, placed third, with roughly 25.7 million visits.

In December 2023, the fast-fashion e-commerce site shein.com was the most visited in the fashion and apparel category worldwide, accounting for over 2.6 percent of desktop traffic. The online site for Nike ranked second, with 1.93 percent of visits.

Chinese brand's popularity in the U.S market

Based on the yearly percentage growth in terms of website traffic, shein.com emerged as the one of the leading fast-fashion retailer websites in the United States in 2021, with a growth of 45 percent compared to 2020. The affordable fast-fashion retailer also got listed as the second most downloaded shopping application in App Store in the United States, with over 17 million downloads in 2021.

Shein and U.S. teens

Shein does not have any physical stores, but it has garnered millions of followers across the globe for its wide range of trendy products and rock-bottom prices. It is the second preferred online shopping website of teens in the United States, after Amazon.

Amazon's global platform 'amazon.com' was the most popular e-commerce and shopping website worldwide, accounting for more than ***** percent of desktop visits to sites in this category in April 2024. Second place went to eBay.com with roughly three percent. Amazon leads the way There is no denying the dominance of Amazon in the e-commerce industry. By 2026, Amazon's worldwide net sales are estimated to exceed *** trillion U.S. dollars. In 2022, amazon.com garnered over ***** billion monthly visitors, maintaining its spot as the most popular retail website worldwide. As of April 2024, the leading social media traffic referrers to amazon.com were YouTube, Facebook, and X. Online shopping Amazon’s strong position is also due to shoppers’ preference for online marketplaces. As of April 2024, nearly ********* of online consumers opted for online marketplaces over all other digital channels. This category of platforms was also ranked as the e-commerce channel delivering the best customer experience in 2024. According to shoppers worldwide, the ***** most important changes that could make their digital shopping experience better were faster delivery, free returns, and more convenient shipping conditions.

Mobile accounts for approximately half of web traffic worldwide. In the last quarter of 2024, mobile devices (excluding tablets) generated 62.54 percent of global website traffic. Mobiles and smartphones consistently hoovered around the 50 percent mark since the beginning of 2017, before surpassing it in 2020. Mobile traffic Due to low infrastructure and financial restraints, many emerging digital markets skipped the desktop internet phase entirely and moved straight onto mobile internet via smartphone and tablet devices. India is a prime example of a market with a significant mobile-first online population. Other countries with a significant share of mobile internet traffic include Nigeria, Ghana and Kenya. In most African markets, mobile accounts for more than half of the web traffic. By contrast, mobile only makes up around 45.49 percent of online traffic in the United States. Mobile usage The most popular mobile internet activities worldwide include watching movies or videos online, e-mail usage and accessing social media. Apps are a very popular way to watch video on the go and the most-downloaded entertainment apps in the Apple App Store are Netflix, Tencent Video and Amazon Prime Video.

As of February 2025, English was the most popular language for web content, with over 49.4 percent of websites using it. Spanish ranked second, with six percent of web content, while the content in the German language followed, with 5.6 percent. English as the leading online language United States and India, the countries with the most internet users after China, are also the world's biggest English-speaking markets. The internet user base in both countries combined, as of January 2023, was over a billion individuals. This has led to most of the online information being created in English. Consequently, even those who are not native speakers may use it for convenience. Global internet usage by regions As of October 2024, the number of internet users worldwide was 5.52 billion. In the same period, Northern Europe and North America were leading in terms of internet penetration rates worldwide, with around 97 percent of its populations accessing the internet.

In March 2025, ******** accounted for ** percent of all social media site visits in the United States, confirming its position as the leading social media website by far. Other social media platforms, despite their popularity, had to make do with smaller shares of visits across desktop, mobile, and tablet devices combined. ********* ranked second with ***** percent of all U.S. social media site visits, while X (previously Twitter) accounted for ***** percent of the total visits in the country. Additionally, the U.S. is home to the third largest social media audience worldwide. Facebook: mobile vs desktop usage At the beginning of 2022, around ** percent of Facebook users across the globe were using the platform’s social networking services exclusively via mobile phone, while only *** percent reported using their desktop or laptop devices. In September 2022, three Facebook Inc. products occupied some of the leading positions as most downloaded social networking apps on the Apple App Store in the United States. WhatsApp’s messaging platform ranked second with more than *** million downloads, while Facebook and the instant-messaging service Messenger followed ranking third and fifth with *** million and **** million downloads respectively. Social media evolution Between 2012 and 2024, the daily time spent on social networks worldwide experienced an almost constant increase, with users reaching an average of *** minutes per day in 2023, with a decrease to *** daily minutes of engagement in 2024. However, users’ favorite platforms have changed since 2019, and the power balance appears to be shifting further from Facebook’s market dominance. Not only Facebook’s user growth rate is estimated to slow down in the next years, but users belonging to Generation Z appear to prefer video-first social platforms like Snapchat, TikTok, and YouTube.

As of April 2023, Amazon was by far the most popular online marketplace worldwide, averaging about 4.8 billion visits that month. The second most visited shopping site was eBay, with roughly 1.2 billion visits. In addition, both were also the world' s top online retailers in terms of mobile web traffic.

Reddit is a web traffic powerhouse: in March 2024 approximately 2.2 billion visits were measured to the online forum, making it one of the most-visited websites online. The front page of the internet Formerly known as “the front page of the internet”, Reddit is an online forum platform with over 130,000 sub-forums and communities. The platform allows registered users, called Redditors, to post content. Each post is open to the entire Reddit community to vote upon, either by down- or upvotes. The most popular posts are featured directly on the front page. Subreddits are available by category and Redditors can follow selected subreddits relevant to their interest and also control what content they see on their custom front page. Some of the most popular subreddits are r/AskReddit or r/AMA – the “Ask Me Anything” format. According to the company, Reddit hosted 1,800 AMAs in 2018, with a wide range of topics and hosts. One of the most popular Reddit AMA of 2022 by number of upvotes was by actor Nicolas Cagem with more than 238.5 thousand upvotes. Reddit usage The United States account for the biggest share of Reddit's desktop traffic, followed by the UK, and Canada. As of March 2023, Reddit ranked among the most popular social media websites in the United States.

In March 2024, search platform Google.com generated approximately 85.5 billion visits, down from 87 billion platform visits in October 2023. Google is a global search platform and one of the biggest online companies worldwide.

Market leader Facebook was the first social network to surpass one billion registered accounts and currently sits at more than three billion monthly active users. Meta Platforms owns four of the biggest social media platforms, all with more than one billion monthly active users each: Facebook (core platform), WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and Instagram. In the third quarter of 2023, Facebook reported around four billion monthly core Family product users. The United States and China account for the most high-profile social platforms Most top ranked social networks with more than 100 million users originated in the United States, but services like Chinese social networks WeChat, QQ or video sharing app Douyin have also garnered mainstream appeal in their respective regions due to local context and content. Douyin’s popularity has led to the platform releasing an international version of its network: a little app called TikTok. How many people use social media? The leading social networks are usually available in multiple languages and enable users to connect with friends or people across geographical, political, or economic borders. In 2025, social networking sites are estimated to reach 5.42 billion users and these figures are still expected to grow as mobile device usage and mobile social networks increasingly gain traction in previously underserved markets.

As of August 2024, the most visited classified website worldwide was avito.ru, with approximately 987.8 million website visits. The consumer-to-consumer (C2C) platform craigslist.org ranked second, with online traffic of roughly 515.2 million users.