Top 100 Most Visited Websites by Search Traffic (2021)

Looking for a list of the most popular websites in the US (and Worldwide) in 2021? 

We pulled the top 100 most visited sites by organic traffic in the US and Worldwide.

We then used Site Explorer and Keywords Explorer—our competitive analysis and keyword research tools—to delve deeper into why some of those websites are popular and where their traffic comes from.

Let’s kick things off with our US data.

Top 100 most visited websites in the US

Unsurprisingly, this list is dominated by big websites that many of us know and love.

Wikipedia is the most visited website on our list, with more than 1.1 billion estimated monthly visits from organic search. Considering that the US population is ~330 million, this means that each person in the US clicks on a Wikipedia result 3.44 times per month, on average.

It’s a similar story for YouTube. On average, every person in the US clicks a YouTube result 2.83 times per month.

Sidenote.

Just to be clear, those numbers are averages. We’re not saying that every person in the US clicks on the same number of YouTube and Wikipedia search results every month. Some people click on many search results, whereas others will click on few or none. 

Amazon is next on the list, with over 585.5 million estimated organic monthly visits.

Interestingly, roughly 14% of those visits come from a single search query, “Amazon,” for which there are 79.5 million monthly searches in the US.

The keyword “Amazon” also has a high Return Rate (RR), meaning that most who perform this search tend to do so multiple times per month.

Why does this happen? Most likely because searching for “Amazon” and clicking on the first result is easier and quicker than typing the entire URL (www.amazon.com) into the address bar. Also, you only have to type “a” into Google for it to suggest “Amazon” as a search term…

… which makes navigation via Google even quicker.

Next up, we have facebook.com and twitter.com with ~467.3 million and 285.5 million monthly organic visits respectively.

Hardly surprising; I think pretty much anyone could have guessed that Wikipedia, YouTube, Amazon, Facebook, and Twitter would be the most visited sites in the US.

So here are a couple of interesting observations from the rest of the top 100:

Google

Google.com is in 25th place with 53.3 million monthly organic visits from the US. Believe it or not, 16.3% of this traffic comes from people Googling “Google.”

But perhaps more interestingly, 5% of Google’s organic traffic goes to the ‘Finance” subfolder.

This is no doubt thanks to the financeSERP feature that appears at the top of the results for hundreds of thousands of stock-related searches like “tesla stock” and “apple nasdaq.”

It’s a similar story for Google Maps, which receives an estimated 8% of all the site’s organic traffic.

This is because Google shows links to Maps whenever you search for a well-known location.

Craigslist

Craigslist is one of the ugliest sites on the internet—I don’t think anyone would disagree.

Yet it still gets more organic traffic than Home Depot, Apple, Netflix, and many other big names.

How? Almost all of its traffic comes from branded searches. In other words, millions of people are searching for things like “Craigslist” and “Craigslist Phoenix” every month.

Interestingly, Craigslist’s popularity is pretty much confined to the US, where it gets 97.8% of its traffic.

Which got me wondering: how many of the top 100 websites in the US are only popular in the US?

So, here are all the sites from the top 100 that get 90%+ of their search traffic from the US and, therefore, aren’t so popular in the rest of the world:

• yelp.com
• walmart.com
• craigslist.org
• homedepot.com

Top 100 most visited websites globally

The first thing we notice about the Worldwide data is that four of the top five most popular sites are the same as in the US: YouTube, Facebook, Wikipedia, and Twitter.

YouTube is the most visited website by far, with 5.5 billion search visits per month.

Most of the other sites on the list are recognizable brands to those of us English speakers, but a few aren’t.

For example, the 24th most visited website in the world—by organic traffic, at least—is vk.com. It looks like this is a popular Russian social network popular amongst Russians, Ukrainians, Kazhaks, Belarusians, and Turks.

I signed up to see which it was like, and it looked uncannily similar to Facebook at first glance.

Another example is the 28th most visited website in the world: uol.com.br. According to Wikipedia, “UOL is the world’s largest Portuguese speaking portal, which is organized in 42 thematic stations with more than 1,000 news sources and 7 million pages.”

That probably explains why almost all (98.2%) of its organic traffic comes from Brazil.

This site is actually more popular in Brazil than Craigslist is in the US!

Speaking of Craigslist, this site also makes the top 100 Worldwide websites, despite almost none of its traffic coming from outside the US. This just goes to show how popular Craigslist is in the US—it gets more organic search traffic from one country than most websites do from all other countries combined.

See how many organic visits any website gets

Are you curious as to how much organic traffic a particular site receives each month?

Head over to Ahrefs’ Site Explorer and paste in the domain. You’ll see the estimated monthly organic traffic to that website, the number of keywords it ranks for in organic search, and some other key SEO metrics.

To learn more, hit the “Organic search” tab.

Here, you will see an interactive graph showing that site’s organic traffic over time:

The graph above shows organic traffic to ahrefs.com, which has grown more than tenfold over the past few years thanks to our ongoing SEO efforts.

Below this, there’s a graph showing the number of keywords the website ranks for in organic search, broken down by ranking position.

To the right of these graphs, we show keyword rankings and organic traffic metrics broken down by country.

You can see that ahrefs.com gets the majority of its search traffic from the US, India, and the UK.

If you want to see all the keywords that a website ranks for, hit the “Organic keywords” report on the left-hand menu.

You can also check the “Top pages” report to see which pages on the domain get the most traffic.

Final thoughts

It’s important to remember that all of the above websites are the most visited in terms of organic search traffic only. None of those figures take into account direct, referral, or any other traffic sources.

We also removed any NSFW websites from the list for obvious reasons.

If you’re curious about the full, unedited list, you can see it in Keywords Explorer.

Source