Anatomy of the Top 1 Million Websites

What the most popular domains on the Internet are made of: TLDs, DNS providers, hosting countries, registrars and domain age

As of September 4, 2026 (UTC)

This report takes the NetAPI Top 1M list of the most popular websites and cross-references every domain in it with the NetAPI domain database: which top-level domain it uses, who serves its DNS, in which country its server is located, which registrar manages it and when it was registered.

The result is a profile of the popular web as opposed to the web as a whole. Every figure below is recomputed daily from the current list; shares are given relative to the domains for which the respective attribute is known.

42.3%
of the Top 1M are .com domains
41.4%
use a country-code TLD
898
different TLDs in the list
43.1%
of known nameservers are Cloudflare
35.5%
of resolved servers are in the United States
10.2 y
median domain age

Top-level domains

.com dominates the popular web, but less than it dominates the domain base as a whole. Country-code TLDs are strongly over-represented among popular websites: a site with a national domain is far more likely to be an active, visited website than a domain in a bulk-registered generic zone.

The table compares each TLD's share of the Top 1M with its share of all domains in the NetAPI database. The index shows how many times more (or less) often a TLD appears among popular websites than among all registered domains.

TLD Domains in the Top 1M Share of the Top 1M Share of all domains Index
.com 422,583 42.26% 52.62% ×0.8
.org 49,095 4.91% 3.79% ×1.3
.uk 35,095 3.51% 0.78% ×4.5
.net 32,459 3.25% 3.92% ×0.8
.de 30,152 3.02% 2.53% ×1.2
.ru 22,086 2.21% 1.69% ×1.3
.jp 22,026 2.20% 0.45% ×4.9
.nl 21,623 2.16% 0.65% ×3.3
.br 18,369 1.84% 0.32% ×5.7
.it 17,181 1.72% 0.86% ×2.0
.in 13,998 1.40% 0.23% ×6.0
.fr 13,678 1.37% 0.71% ×1.9
.cn 12,325 1.23% 1.69% ×0.7
.pl 10,669 1.07% 0.65% ×1.6
.io 8,123 0.81% 0.38% ×2.2
.co 7,739 0.77% 0.23% ×3.3
.au 7,540 0.75% 0.29% ×2.6
.ca 7,341 0.73% 0.30% ×2.4
.xyz 6,412 0.64% 3.29% ×0.2
.es 6,067 0.61% 0.27% ×2.2
.cz 5,992 0.60% 0.29% ×2.1
.ua 5,879 0.59% 0.08% ×7.6
.us 5,865 0.59% 0.11% ×5.3
.id 5,499 0.55% 0.08% ×6.8
.shop 5,412 0.54% 1.19% ×0.5

Index = share of the Top 1M ÷ share of all domains. ×2.0 means the TLD is twice as common among popular websites as among all registered domains; ×0.5 means half as common.


DNS providers

Who answers DNS queries for the most popular websites. The provider is determined from the domain's authoritative nameservers. Cloudflare's share among popular websites is several times higher than its share of all domains, where registrar-default nameservers prevail.

Based on 671,807 domains with known nameservers (67.2%).

DNS provider Domains in the Top 1M Share of known
Cloudflare (cloudflare.com) 289,284 43.06%
GoDaddy (domaincontrol.com) 42,213 6.28%
Hostinger (dns-parking.com) 10,567 1.57%
Google Domains (googledomains.com) 10,528 1.57%
NameCheap (registrar-servers.com) 9,216 1.37%
Azure Cloud (azure-dns.com) 7,001 1.04%
Network Solutions (Newfold) (worldnic.com) 6,846 1.02%
Gname (share-dns.com) 6,242 0.93%
OVHcloud (ovh.net) 6,187 0.92%
HiChina (hichina.com) 6,130 0.91%
akam.net (akam.net) 4,865 0.72%
Gandi.net (gandi.net) 3,816 0.57%
IBM NS1 (nsone.net) 3,794 0.56%
Alibaba Cloud Computing (alidns.com) 3,706 0.55%
Name.com (name.com) 3,615 0.54%

Hosting countries

Where the servers behind popular websites are located, by the country of the IP address the domain resolved to during our last crawl.

Based on 547,901 domains with a resolved server IP (54.8%). Domains behind a CDN or a reverse proxy are attributed to the country of the edge IP address, which inflates the share of the United States.

Country Domains in the Top 1M Share of known
United States (US) 194,677 35.53%
Germany (DE) 68,161 12.44%
Canada (CA) 44,039 8.04%
Japan (JP) 21,555 3.93%
France (FR) 20,879 3.81%
Russia (RU) 19,862 3.63%
Netherlands (NL) 16,582 3.03%
United Kingdom (GB) 15,180 2.77%
China (CN) 11,924 2.18%
Singapore (SG) 10,267 1.87%
India (IN) 9,146 1.67%
Ukraine (UA) 8,560 1.56%
Brazil (BR) 6,772 1.24%
Czech Republic (CZ) 6,449 1.18%
Italy (IT) 6,429 1.17%

Registrars

Which registrars manage the domains of popular websites, according to registration data. Corporate registrars such as MarkMonitor and CSC, which are marginal in the domain base as a whole, appear in the top 20 here.

Based on 602,462 domains with known registrar data (60.2%).

Registrar Domains in the Top 1M Share of known
GoDaddy.com, LLC 123,908 20.57%
NameCheap, Inc. 63,546 10.55%
Network Solutions, LLC 28,085 4.66%
Tucows Domains Inc. 19,148 3.18%
Dynadot Inc 17,888 2.97%
Cloudflare, Inc. 14,850 2.46%
Amazon Registrar, Inc. 14,779 2.45%
OVH sas 11,730 1.95%
Name.com, Inc. 11,556 1.92%
Gname.com Pte. Ltd. 11,449 1.90%
GMO Internet Group, Inc. d/b/a Onamae.com 11,430 1.90%
PDR Ltd. d/b/a PublicDomainRegistry.com 11,327 1.88%
CSC Corporate Domains, Inc. 11,178 1.86%
Gandi SAS 10,626 1.76%
NameSilo, LLC 10,217 1.70%

Domain age

The median popular domain was registered 10.2 years ago. The distribution is two-humped: a large core of domains older than ten years, and a sizeable share of domains registered within the last year.

The young end of the distribution is concentrated in the lower ranks of the list and largely consists of short-lived sites (gambling, streaming, promotional mirrors) that briefly attract traffic and disappear. The rank-tier table below makes this visible: the average age rises steadily towards the top of the list.

Based on 667,583 domains with a known registration date (66.8%).


By rank tier

The same attributes broken down by position in the list. The higher the rank, the more likely a domain is a .com, the older it is, and the more likely its DNS is served by Cloudflare.

Ranks .com share Cloudflare DNS share Average age (years)
1 - 1,000 49.7% 33.0% 18.1
1,001 - 10,000 46.9% 26.3% 18.7
10,001 - 100,000 46.0% 28.9% 15.2
100,001 - 1,000,000 41.8% 29.0% 11.7

Cloudflare share is given relative to all domains in the tier, including those with unknown nameservers; average age is computed over domains with a known registration date.


Popular domains in threat feeds

Of the one million domains, 892 have appeared in the public threat-intelligence feeds NetAPI aggregates, that is 0.09% of the list. For the picture across all domains, see the TLD abuse report and the registrar abuse report.

At the very top of the list the flagged domains are mostly large platforms hosting user content (link shorteners, blogging and social platforms, banks targeted by phishing kits), listed because of abusive pages hosted on them rather than because the domain itself is malicious.


Methodology

Source: the NetAPI Top 1M list (registrable domains, eTLD+1), cross-referenced with the NetAPI domain database, which currently holds data on every domain in the list. Attributes come from our own crawler and DNS/registration data lookups and are only as fresh as the last check of each domain.

DNS provider = the registrable domain of the first authoritative nameserver (for example ns1.example-dns.net → example-dns.net). Hosting country = the country of the IP address the domain resolved to during the last crawl. Domain age = time since the registration date reported by the registry. Shares for these attributes are relative to the domains for which the attribute is known; the coverage is stated in each section.

Index in the TLD table = the TLD's share of the Top 1M divided by its share of all domains in the NetAPI database. The report is recomputed every day together with the list; monthly snapshots are kept for the trend chart.

This report is published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0) license. You may reuse the figures and charts, including commercially, with attribution to NetAPI and a link to https://netapi.com/research/top-1m-anatomy/.

The underlying list is free: NetAPI Top 1M or download the CSV directly at /netapi_top1mln.csv.

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