How many websites with traffic are there on the internet?

I spontaneously asked myself how one can find out how many websites that receive traffic actually exist on the internet.

After some reflection, I realized that this information is publicly available. The Chrome User Experience Report is a massive database that accumulates data on CWV metrics tied to origins, which are actually the domains or subdomains of websites.

We can make queries to this database through BigQuery. Considering that the database has been populated since October 2017, it contains information not only about the current number of websites with traffic, but also historical data.

After experimenting a bit with SQL, I managed to create a query that allows exporting the number of origins from each table, from the first to the last. Here’s the query:

SELECT
  _TABLE_SUFFIX as yyyymm,
  FORMAT_TIMESTAMP("%B %Y", PARSE_DATE("%Y%m", _TABLE_SUFFIX)) as month_year,
  COUNT(DISTINCT origin) as distinct_origins
FROM `chrome-ux-report.all.*`
WHERE _TABLE_SUFFIX >= '201710'
GROUP BY yyyymm
ORDER BY yyyymm

As a result, I obtain data with the number of origins, which equals websites with traffic of around 500 users.

How many websites with traffic are there on the internet according to Google Chrome data?

According to Google Chrome data, in January 2018, there were 3,086,603 websites recorded, and by March 2024, this figure reached 18,669,191. The amount of websites with traffic in 2024 has increased sixfold compared to 2018.

Below, you can see a graph illustrating the changes over time:

So, competition is only increasing, as is the number of players in the online market.