How many websites with traffic are there on the internet?

On a whim I asked myself: how can you find out how many websites that actually get traffic exist on the internet?

After a bit of thinking, I realised this information is publicly available. The Chrome User Experience Report is a giant database that accumulates CWV metrics data, tying it to origins — which are effectively the domains or subdomains of websites.

We can query this database via BigQuery. Given that the database has been populated since October 2017, it contains information not only about the number of sites with traffic right now, but also historical data.

After experimenting a little with SQL, I managed to build a query that exports the number of origins from each table, from the first to the latest. Here’s the query:

SELECT
  _TABLE_SUFFIX as yyyymm,
  FORMAT_DATE("%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 get the number of origins, i.e. websites with traffic. Google doesn’t publish the exact threshold for a site to get into CrUX; unofficial estimates put it at around 500 users.

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

According to Google Chrome, in January 2018 there were 3,086,603 sites recorded, in March 2024 — 18,669,191, and as of August 2026 — 18,294,881. So over eight and a half years the number of sites with traffic grew almost 6×.

Below you can see the chart of the dynamics (updated monthly):

Most of the growth happened in 2018–2022, with a sharp jump in 2022: from 8.6M in March to 17.7M in September. Since 2023 the number of sites with traffic has held at 17–19M. The peak was 18,936,684 in September 2024. Every December there is a seasonal dip to ~17.2–17.4M.

Keep in mind that an origin isn’t quite a website: every subdomain (ca.jooble.org, blog.example.com) and every http/https scheme is counted separately. If you collapse origins into registered domains (the NET.REG_DOMAIN function in BigQuery), August 2026 has 13,555,934 of them, about 74% of the origin count. That share has always stayed within 71–76%, so the dynamics are the same: since January 2018 both figures grew almost 6×.

So the number of players in the online market is no longer growing as fast as it used to, but it isn’t shrinking either. Competition for traffic among the same ~18M sites remains high.