Knowing your competition and target audience can help navigate your business to success. As a marketer, advertising expert, or Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategist, there are a variety of data sets you analyze daily for your company. One data set you shouldn’t overlook is the top 1 million websites list. It lets you find out which websites are getting the most traction. It also gives you an inside look at your companies competition.
There are various services and websites you can use to locate a list of high-traffic sites. However, the results per data set can vary dramatically, so it benefits you to have accurate sources.
Why do data results vary?
Data results based on the top 1 million websites for download list vary because companies collect data differently. For instance, while some companies use scraping bots, others use cookie data, and still, more use Internet Service Provider Data. Companies also collect the data at different time intervals and compile it based on various ranking systems:
- SEO Rankings – Majestic
- User Chrome Extention Usage – Alexa
- DNS Searches
- Domain Authority/Trust Factors like Quality Backlink Acquisition, Content Quality etc.
- Internet Service Providers Data – Cisco Umbrella
- Open Source Page Rank – DomCop
Be sure to look at how much the data set covers and the specific ranking system when you find one you like. Some data sets strive to cover the internet as a whole with billions of data points measured, while others niche into specific:
- Categories (Alexa categories (already retired), SimilarWeb Top Websites categories, iAB Taxonomy categories)
- Industries
- Keywords
- Timeframes (Tranco updates once a month, Alexa updates daily, Majestic updates daily)
The 12 Most Reliable Data Sets to Download Top 1 Million Sites
There are 12 data resources across the web that outshine the rest. The best part is that these data sets can cover virtually anything you might be looking for regarding top website information.
1. Alexa Top 1 Million Websites
Amazon’s, Alexa top 1 million websites traffic analyzer is a paid tool that allows you to access a list of the top sites across the web. It is one of the most accurate and accessible tools, but it is shutting down in May 2022. While you can download your top 1 million websites list as a CVS file, you can also access lots of other intriguing data about your competition:
- Keywords
- Specific site searches
- Similar Sites based on where audiences overlap
- Social Engagement with a Site
- Audience Geographic
- Site Backlinking Statistics
Alexa has been around since 1996 and offers reliability for marketers looking to analyze web-based data. Alexa.com rankings will be retired on May 1st 2022.
Alexa Top 1 Million Websites CSV Columns: Rank | Domain
Example: 1 | google.com
Download Links: https://www.alexa.com/topsites
Download CSV: https://s3.amazonaws.com/alexa-static/top-1m.csv.zip
2. DomCop Top 10 Million Websites
DomCop uses crawlers from its server to scrape the web and bring you a list of high-ranking sites with expired domains. At first glance, this might not seem helpful, but websites with expired domains go up on the market, and you can purchase them. Purchasing a site is a profitable business venture if it has high-ranking backlinks. The timeframe is tracked to the minute, so you can plan for when these sites fall back into the domain.
DomCop also compiled a list of the top 10 million sites by using:
- CommonCrawl
- CommonSearch
- Open Source Page Rank Initiative
The project is open-source and available on the DomCop and as a free download. The site is very user-friendly, though it does not attempt to analyze the data for you.
DomCop Top 10 Millions Websites CSV Columns: Rank | Domain | Open Page Rank
Example: 1 | facebook.com | 10.00
Download Links: https://www.domcop.com/top-10-million-websites
Download CSV: https://www.domcop.com/files/top/top10milliondomains.csv.zip
3. Majestic Million
Majestic publishes its majestic top 1 million sites list every day, so you know your data is relevant. Having up-to-date information is essential when looking at specific or seasonal market trends. The majestic top 1 million sites are compiled similarly to popular SEO rankings by prioritizing backlinks. Majestic Million offers you a free web browser plugin that lets you see data on individual sites:
- Number of links to the page and domain
- Number of domains that link to the site
- How widespread the backlinks are
- Trust flow score
- Timeline of link acquisition for the site
If you subscribe to the service, you get more analytic features for each site.
Majestic Top 1 Million Websites CSV Columns:
GlobalRank | TldRank | Domain | TLD | RefSubNets | RefIPs | IDN_Domain | IDN_TLD | PrevGlobalRank | PrevTldRank | PrevRefSubNets | PrevRefIPs
Example: 1 | 1| google.com | com | 510517 | 2714606 | google.com | com | 1 | 1 | 510672 | 2713712
Download Links: https://majestic.com/reports/majestic-million
Download CSV: https://downloads.majestic.com/majestic_million.csv
4. Similar Web
If you are looking for sites that rank high in SEO, you may be interested in Similar Web. It offers you the top 50 sites for free by category & by country. To access the rest of the data sets, you need a membership. Similar Web offerers a very comprehensive service that analyzes over 10 billion digital signals each day. The company employs the best data scientists to bring you a variety of data sets:
- Top 100 million websites list
- 190 countries are analyzed
- Website data complied for 210 categories
- 235 million product SKUs are ranked
- 1 billion search terms
- Data on 4.7 million apps
- 10 billion content pages
It also offers a user-friendly platform to access or download the data and review trends.
SimilarWeb Top Websites Columns:
Rank | Website | Category | Change | Avg. Visit Duration | Pages / Visit | Bounce Rate
Example: 1 | google.com | Computers Electronics and Technology > Search Engines | = | 00:11:28 | 8.62 | 27.91%
Download Links: https://www.similarweb.com/top-websites/
5. BuiltWith
BuiltWith is the mega database of the internet. Along with the BuiltWith top 1 million websites by technology list, you can also find data sets based on:
- Web Technology Trends – https://trends.builtwith.com
(Advertising, Analytics, Hosting, CMS, even CDN, eCommerce carts, SEO meta, Domain Registars, Mobile etc) - Keyword Lists – https://builtwith.com/website-lists
- eCommerce Lists – https://builtwith.com/ecommerce
- Technology Investor – https://trends.builtwith.com/investor-center
- Discovery Leads Lists – https://leadsdiscovery.builtwith.com/dashboard
- LeadsEye Lists – https://leadseye.builtwith.com/dashboard
- Hyper Alerts – https://hyper.builtwith.com/dashboard
- BuiltWith API Access – https://api.builtwith.com
- Datasets – https://builtwith.com/datasets
- Country – https://trends.builtwith.com/country/usa
You can access a limited amount of data for free with this software as a service (SaaS), but it would be beneficial to have a paid account if you are a marketer. You can analyze global websites trends with BuiltWith as the service has over 20 years of data compiled.
BuiltWith Top 1 Million Websites CSV Columns:
Domain | Location on Site | Tech Spend USD | Sales Revenue USD | Company | Vertical | Tranco | Page Rank | Majestic | Umbrella | Telephones | Emails | Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn | Google | Pinterest | GitHub | Instagram | Vk | Vimeo | Youtube | TikTok | People | City | State | Zip | Country | First Detected | Last Found | First Indexed | Last Indexed | Exclusion | Compliance
Example: bedbathandbeyond.com | thekitchen.bedbathandbeyond.com | $10000 | $7247936 | Bed Bath & Beyond Inc | Hobbies And Interests | 1522 | 10895 | 3305 | 3792 | ph:+1-800-410-2153;+1-800-462-3966;+1-855-401-4222;+1-908-688-0888 | support@bedbathandbeyond.com | https://twitter.com/bedbathbeyond | https://facebook.com/bedbathandbeyond | https://pinterest.com/bedbathbeyond | https://instagram.com/bedbathandbeyond | https://youtube.com/user/bedbathandbeyond | Eric Winnegrad – Director – eric.winnegrad@bedbathandbeyond.com; Jeffrey Smith – Manager – jeffrey.smith@bedbathandbeyond.com; Ashley Adams – Manager – ashley.adams@bedbathandbeyond.com; Arthur Stark – President – arthur.stark@bedbathandbeyond.com | Canandaigua | NY | 14424 | US | 2018-10-01 | 2021-12-14 | 2002-03-26 | 2021-12-31 | – | –
6. Cisco Umbrella
Crisco Umbrella bases its ranking on the most frequent DNS requests instead of backlinks or the most search sites. Some websites you find in Crisco Umbrella’s top 1 million websites list you won’t find in the others. You can view the open-source Umbrella ranking list via a free CVS download.
- The popularity list contains our most queried domains based on passive DNS usage across our Umbrella global network of more than 100 Billion requests per day with 65 million unique active users, in more than 165 countries. Unlike Alexa, the metric is not based on only browser based ‘http’ requests from users but rather takes in to account the number of unique client IPs invoking this domain relative to the sum of all requests to all domains. (https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/umbrella-static/index.html)
Cisco Umbrella Top 1 Million Websites CSV Columns: Rank | Domain
Example: 1 | netflix.com
Download Links: https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/umbrella-static/index.html
Download CSV: https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/umbrella-static/top-1m.csv.zip
7. Tranco-List
Tranco-list is brought to you by a research community that looked at the big tech resources on the market and disagreed with them. It came about because the community hypothesized that the popular site ranking websites:
- Can be manipulated by malicious players
- Don’t update as data changes
- Don’t have permanent citable references
Tranco-list is created by compiling & comparing data from:
- Alexa
- Majestic
- Cisco Umbrella
It claims that these sites have very different ranking formulas and strives to analyze them and put them together for better customer use.
Tranco Top 1 Websites CSV Columns: Rank | Domain
Example: 1 | netflix.com
Download Links: https://tranco-list.eu
Download CSV Tranco Top 1 Million:https://tranco-list.eu/download/XVWN/1000000
Download CSV Tranco full list ~5 Millions: https://tranco-list.eu/download/XVWN/full
8. Quantcast
Quantcast exclusively monitors first-party cookie data to bring your real-time website data on the Quantcast platform. With the platform, you can analyze:
- website data
- customer behavior data
- patterns and trends
AI technology powers the database and collects more than 1 trillion online signals per day.
9. Moz
Moz is a SaaS that deals in SEO. Along with offering the top 500 of the internets most popular sites to you for free, it also has tools you can use to research:
- Keywords
- Link building
- Site audits
- Page Optimization
- Ranking
MOZ Top 500 Websites CSV Columns: Rank | Root Domain | Linking Root Domains | Domain Authority
Example: 1 | https://support.google.com | 5,045,633 | 100
Download Links: https://moz.com/top500
Download CSV: https://moz.com/top-500/download/?table=top500Domains
10. HackerTarget
HackerTarget offers information on the top 100K WordPress sites. WordPress powers many websites on the internet, from more prominent brands to small blogs. In fact, of the top 1 million websites, 73.5% are hosted by WordPress.
Hackertracker offers a variety of exciting tools for marketers, but it also has exclusive WordPress content:
- Data on the top 100K WordPress sites
- Website security issues
- Top 25 WordPress Plug-Ins
- Top 25 WordPress Themes
MOZ Top 500 Websites CSV Columns: Rank | Alexa Rank | Site
Example: 1 | 1 | BusinessInsider.com
Download Links: https://hackertarget.com/100k-top-wordpress-powered-sites
Download CSV: https://hackertarget.com/download/wp100k-jun19.csv.gz
11. Netcraft
Netcraft is an internet analysis and security company that has been around for over 25 years. The company has a data list available on its site of the top 100 websites. It also offers a variety of services:
- Cybercrime Detection
- Security Testing
- PCI Compliance
- Internet Data Mining
It has services that can help you determine who your biggest competitors are on the web out of different traffic categories:
- Top 10,000 tier
- Top 100,000 tier
- Top 1 million tier
Netcraft Top 100 / 50k Websites Columns: Rank | Site | First Seen | Netblock | Site Report | Country
Example: 1 | https://google.com/ | November 1998 | Google LLC | View Site Report | US
Download Links: https://trends.netcraft.com/topsites
12. CommonCrawl
CommonCrawl has collected seven years’ worth of website data for customers to use for free. It collects data every two months to show how trends change over time. The CommonCrawl data set is unique from other collections because it offers:
- Information in over 40 languages
- As raw, meta, or text data
- Trillions of links
Furthermore, the company is a non-profit organization that gives everyone access to data, not just the big tech firms that collect it. Unlike some smaller companies on the list, CommonCrawl has bots that scrape the internet. To keep the service going, you must donate to access data.
Top Websites:
Certain websites tend to stay in the top 20 to 25 sites. These include major search engines, comprehensive social media sites, and even some stores. Some websites that remain towards the top of the list include:
- Google.com
- Amazon.com
- Facebook.com
- Youtube.com
- Wikipedia.org
DIY Data Collection
Suppose you don’t like the thought of using a major data site. If you have IT experience or a drive to collect your data via web scraping, you could use Scraping Robot’s simple web scraping tool Scraping API. You can find a variety of data points by setting up scrapes yourself:
- Website keyword data
- Web Traffic Data
- Marketing Data
- Sales Data
- Identify Growth Opportunities
The Best Data Sets on the Web
There are plenty of data sets to choose from on the web. If you are in a pinch for time, you want one that has an excellent interface, is easy to access and has the most reliable data. Many of the platforms mentioned compiling the data set for you and using AI technology to analyze it—taking out another step of the work.
The top three data sets ranked for usability, reliability, and features include:
- Alexa
- Similar Web
- BuiltWith
Now that you are armed with the knowledge on 12 of the most reliable data sets on the internet test them out and choose the one that works best for your company’s research.
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