The Top Websites in the World

How They Change Over Time

About this dataset

This dataset consists of the top 50 most visited websites in the world, as well as the category and principal country/territory for each site. The data provides insights into which sites are most popular globally, and what type of content is most popular in different parts of the world

How to use the dataset

This dataset can be used to track the most popular websites in the world over time. It can also be used to compare website popularity between different countries and categories

Research Ideas

• To track the most popular websites in the world over time
• To see how website popularity changes by region
• To find out which website categories are most popular

Acknowledgements

Dataset by Alexa Internet, Inc. (2019), released on Kaggle under the Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and License (ODC-PDDL)

License

License: CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) - Public Domain Dedication No Copyright - You can copy, modify, distribute and perform the work, even for commercial purposes, all without asking permission. See Other Information.

Columns

File: df_1.csv | Column name | Description | |:--------------------------------|:---------------------------------------------------------------------| | Site | The name of the website. (String) | | Domain Name | The domain name of the website. (String) | | Category | The category of the website. (String) | | Principal country/territory | The principal country/territory where the website is based. (String) |

In August 2025, Google.com was the most visited website worldwide, attracting approximately 5.66 billion unique monthly visitors. YouTube.com ranked second, with an estimated 2.98 billion unique visitors. Both platforms also held the top positions globally in terms of total website visits.

In August 2025, Google.com was the most visited website worldwide, with an average of 98.2 billion monthly visits. The platform has maintained its leading position since June 2010, when it surpassed Yahoo to take first place. YouTube ranked second during the same period, recording over 48 billion monthly visits. 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 May 2020, YouTube generated over 5.3 billion global visits via organic search traffic. Second-ranked Wikipedia accumulated less than half of that, claiming 2.2 billion organic search visits. Social network Facebook rounded off the top properties with more than a billion organic search visits during the measured period.

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.

Google Search Statistics 2023

• Google is the most searched website in the World.
• Google receives more visitors than any other site. Google is accessed 89.3 trillion times per month.
• Google is used by billions of people every day to conduct their searches. Google is much more than a simple search engine.
• Google provides many other services. Google Shopping and Google News also feature. Google Mail, Google's popular email service, is included.
• Google organic search traffic is 16.3% of the total US searches.

Content

I collected data from here by country and with the help of a little bit of data wrangling, I could convert the data into the JSON and CSV format. The dataset contains 2 files:

countries.json: The top 50 most popular websites by each country, the ranking order is stored by indexes. sites.csv: General information about every website on the list, such as: * Daily Minutes on Site: Estimated daily minutes on site per visitor to the site * Daily Pageviews per Visitor: Estimated daily unique pageviews per visitor on the site * Ratio of Traffic From Search: The ratio of all referrals that came from Search engines over the trailing month * Total Sites Linking In: The total number of sites that are linked to this website

Acknowledgements

Source: Alexa.com.

A complete list of live websites using the Most Popular Post technology, compiled through global website indexing conducted by WebTechSurvey.

In March 2024, Google.com was the leading website in the United States. The search platform accounted for over 19 percent of desktop web traffic in the United States, ahead of second-ranked YouTube.com with 10.71 percent.

Context

This dataset includes some of the basic information of the websites we daily use. While scrapping this info, I learned quite a lot in R programming, system speed, memory usage etc. and developed my niche in Web Scrapping. It took about 4-5 hrs for scrapping this data through my system (4GB RAM) and nearly about 4-5 days working out my idea through this project.

Content

The dataset contains Top 50 ranked sites from each 191 countries along with their traffic (global) rank. Here, country_rank represent the traffic rank of that site within the country, and traffic_rank represent the global traffic rank of that site.

Since most of the columns meaning can be derived from their name itself, its pretty much straight forward to understand this dataset. However, there are some instances of confusion which I would like to explain in here:

1) most of the numeric values are in character format, hence, contain spaces which you might need to clean on.

2) There are multiple instances of same website. for.e.g. Yahoo. com is present in 179 rows within this dataset. This is due to their different country rank in each country.

3)The information provided in this dataset is for the top 50 websites in 191 countries as on 25th May 2017 and is subjected to change in future time due to the dynamic structure of ranking.

4) The dataset inactual contains 9540 rows instead of 9550(50*191 rows). This was due to the unavailability of information for 10 websites.

PS: in case if there are anymore queries, comment on this, I'll add an answer to that in above list.

Acknowledgements

I wouldn't have done this without the help of others. I've scrapped this information from publicly available (open to all) websites namely: 1) http://data.danetsoft.com/ 2) http://www.alexa.com/topsites , of which i'm highly grateful. I truly appreciate and thanks the owner of these sites for providing us with the information that I included today in this dataset.

Inspiration

I feel that there this a lot of scope for exploring & visualization this dataset to find out the trends in the attributes of these websites across countries. Also, one could try predicting the traffic(global) rank being a dependent factor on the other attributes of the website. In any case, this dataset will help you find out the popular sites in your area.

Silatus is sharing, for free, a segment of a dataset that we are using to train a generative AI model for text-to-mockup conversions. This dataset was collected in December 2022 and early January 2023, so it contains very recent data from 1,000 of the world's most popular websites. You can get our larger 10,000 website dataset for free at: https://silatus.com/datasets

This dataset includes:

High-res screenshots

• 1024x1024px
• Loaded Javascript
• Loaded Images

Text metadata

• Site title
• Navbar content
• Full page text data
• Page description

Visual metadata

• Content (images, videos, inputs, buttons) absolute & relative positions
• Color profile
• Base font

In November 2024, Google.com was the most visited website in Mexico, with approximately 2.83 billion total visits. Its local URL Google.com.mx ranked eleventh, with about 109 million accesses. Social video platform YouTube.com ranked second with 1.28 billion visits. Additionally, the social media platform Facebook.com ranked third with 316 million visits in the examined period.

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, Google.com was the leading website in Finland by unique visits, with around 17.3 million single accesses to the URL during that month. YouTube.com followed, with around 11.7 million unique monthly visits. Wikipedia.org came in third, with 8.13 million unique monthly visits.

This dataset about Most Popular websites is extracted from Flourish visualisation. If you want to know more about Flourish click here.

Context

This dataset is coming from the DistroWatch website, a popular website in the linux community.

Content

I acquire this dataset the 20th of June 2019, so the dataset is composed by data gathered at most one year before this date. Each column sum up the number of times each distribution page have been visited in the last 1, 3 ,6 or 12 months.

Acknowledgements

DistroWatch

As of November 2024, Google.com had the highest average number of monthly visitors from Israel, at 284 million entries. It was followed by YouTube.com with 101 million visitors. Other popular websites included Ynet.co.il and Facebook.com, the former being the most visited news website in the country. Ynet had 65.3 million entries per month and was also the most popular Israeli website in the ranking.

KAP - Knowledge, Attitude and Practice.

In November 2024, Google.com was the leading website in Colombia by unique visits, with around 52.9 million single accesses to the URL during that month. YouTube.com came in second with approximately 30.9 million unique monthly visits. Facebook ranked third with 24.2 million unique monthly visits.

In November 2024, Google.com was the most visited website in Brazil, with approximately 6.56 billion total visits. YouTube.com came in second with 3.13 billion total visits. The local URL Google.com.br ranked ninth, with about 278 million accesses. Facebook.com counted approximately 439 million monthly visits from Brazilian online audiences.