Domain popularity ranking, new list daily, read monthly

Tranco

A research-grade ranking of the internet's most popular domains, built to resist manipulation, used here as the all-traffic signal.

Run by: KU Leuven, TU Delft and Stony Brook University
Since: 2018
Refreshed: New list daily, read monthly

Tranco is an academic project that combines several independent top-sites lists, among them Cloudflare Radar, Cisco Umbrella, Majestic and Farsight, into one daily ranking of the most popular domains on the internet: a standard list of the top million, and a full list that runs past four million domains. It was introduced in a peer-reviewed paper at the Network and Distributed System Security Symposium in 2019, written precisely because the single-provider lists researchers had been using were unstable and easy to game.

It matters here because it counts all traffic, not only search. A site with a large app audience, heavy advertising or a direct following shows up on Tranco even when its search footprint is small.

Why it can be relied on

It is maintained by university researchers and documented in a peer-reviewed paper, with the method published rather than described in marketing copy.
It was explicitly hardened against manipulation: it averages several sources over a window, so one day of artificial traffic to one provider does not move a domain far.
Every daily list has a permanent identifier and stays downloadable, so a rank I quote can be checked against the exact list it came from.
It is the ranking of choice in academic security and web-measurement research, which is a harder audience than the marketing industry.
Anyone can query a domain's rank history through the public API, so a figure on this site can be verified in a few seconds.

What is taken from it

All-traffic rank: Each site's position on the full list, which runs past four million domains, so a rank such as 2,800,000 is a real rank. It is shown in the comparison tables and on the sites list.
Rank history: The change between the list read for this month's edition and the one read the month before, shown on the sites list; the monthly analysis gives the number of days between the two lists, which is not always 30.
The order of the brand lists: Sites with no tracked Google position for the category's own search are listed by their Tranco rank. It is an order for reading the lists, not a ranking: only tested tools are ranked.
Not a gate: A Tranco rank is not a condition for being measured. Every listed site the monthly pull measures is in the figures; a site too small for the full list simply shows no rank.

What it cannot tell me

It is a rank, not a visit count. I never convert a Tranco position into visitors.
Even the full list ends somewhere past four million domains. A smaller site is simply absent, which is not the same as having no users.
It measures the domain, so a brand that lives mostly inside an app store, a bot or a larger site is underrepresented.

Where it appears on this site

Cited as Tranco, with the month it covers, on every category’s statistics pages where it applies. In the AI girlfriend section, for example:

The source itself

This is the only page on the site that links out to Tranco. Everywhere else, a citation links here instead, so the context travels with the number.

Visit tranco-list.eu

The other data sources

Written by Miles Foster, Owner and tester, RankDude. RankDude is not affiliated with Tranco. How tested platforms are graded is on the methodology page; the data in use is on the AI girlfriend statistics pages.