The NexURLs Internet Report
What 1,717 websites people chose to share tell us about the internet worth visiting. Every number here is counted from real data, and how we counted it is at the bottom.
How old is the internet people share?
Half the sites on NexURLs were already online by 2010. 50% have been around since before 2010, and 17% first showed up in 2020 or later. 205 of them were already online in the 1990s. The good stuff on the internet is older than you think.
By the decade each site first appeared in the Internet Archive. Based on 1,173 sites with a saved copy.
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How many websites die?
We check every site about once a week. Right now 15 of the 1,717 sites we have checked are gone, which is under 1%. The most common way a site dies here is the page just disappearing (a 404).
How they died
Gone, by when the site first went online
Based on 1,717 sites checked by our link health system. A site only counts as gone after failing three checks in a row.
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Is .com still king?
58% of the sites on their own domain still end in .com. Among sites that first went online in 2022 or later, 15% use .ai or .io. For sites from before 2015 it is 1%.
Domain endings of 1,539 sites on their own domain.
Living on someone else’s platform
10% of everything shared lives on a platform like YouTube, GitHub or itch.io instead of its own domain.
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How many sites are secure?
97% of the sites load over a secure https connection. The 55 that do not are mostly old. Half of them were online by 2020.
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What people share
The biggest topic is Tools, followed by Fun & Games and Learning & Books. The oldest corner is News, where half the sites were online by 1999. The youngest is Tools, where half arrived in 2019 or later.
Number of sites in each topic. A site can be in more than one.
The oldest sites still online
These have been on the web longer than anything else on NexURLs, and they still answer when you knock.
The iconic Bigfoot video hoax confirmedvariety.com · online since 1996Holoworld: create verifiable AI agents and interactive avatarsholoworld.com · online since 1996Rigorous Analysis Confirms NASA’s Artemis II Heat Shield Performancenasa.gov · online since 1996YouTube Is Looking to Expand Into Audiobookswsj.com · online since 1996A new Antarctic ice sheet model projects Thwaites Glacier could raise sea levels by up tonature.com · online since 1996The Woman Who Has Worked for the NHS Since Its Foundingbbc.co.uk · online since 1996Kal Penn and John Cho Have Officially Signed on to Return for 'Harold and Kumar 4'deadline.com · online since 1996TikTok Permanently Bans the ‘Musk’ Film Account, Raising Suppression Fearshollywoodreporter.com · online since 1996How we counted
- The sites. Every website listed on NexURLs on October 19, 2026, 1,717 in all, leaving out the ones marked mature. These are sites people chose to share, so this is a picture of the internet people think is worth a visit, not a random sample of the whole web.
- Age. The year of the first saved copy of each site in the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. A site can be a little older than that, never newer. 1,173 of the 1,717 had a saved copy.
- Gone. We open every site about once a week. A site only counts as gone after failing three checks in a row, at least a day apart: the address stops answering, the page returns a 404 or 410, the domain shows a for-sale parking page, or the video was removed. Sites that block bots or are just slow count as online.
- Domain endings, https and platforms. Read straight from each site’s address.
- No guessing. Every number is counted by code from our own data. Nothing is estimated. Each edition is frozen on the day it is counted, so a number you quote will not change later.
Use this data
Writing about the web? You are welcome to quote any number here or use the data file, free, under a CC BY 4.0 license. Just link back to this page.