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_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 get the number of origins = websites with traffic from roughly 500 users and up.

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, and as of March 2024 that figure stands at 18,669,191. The volume of sites with traffic in 2024 grew 6× compared with 2018.

Below you can see the chart of the dynamics:

So competition is only growing — as is the number of players in the online market.