Domain rankings guide: how to find top websites and domains

With this guide written by James Iles, we happily start a new series of guest articles written by data industry experts and professionals.

Whether you’re performing a research task, attempting to find leads, or you’re analyzing your company’s competition, website ranking metrics are a vital and powerful part of your arsenal.

As a domain name analyst and consultant, I use comparative data to identify new opportunities, search for undiscovered domain sales, and new services to write about.

How do you find the top ranking websites and domain names? As you might expect, there are several different services available to help you. Here are my top picks for services to find the top websites and domains on the Internet.

Host.io

Launched in 2020 as a new powerful product from IPInfo, Host.io offers powerful and fast access to domain name data.

Before launching, Host.io was hard at work ranking the top 10 million domain names. The ranking system is based on backlinks, page content, and more, so it’s a far more intelligent ranking process than you may have expected. Domain rankings are also updated on a monthly basis.

The entire list is available to download for free in one .csv file but if you want to be more specific with your analysis, you can use Host.io’s API to check the rank of specific domain names. This is the most useful way to interact with Host.io’s ranking system if you are looking to inspect and compare ranking data for particular domains.

After signing up for an account, which starts from free for 1,000 requests, Host.io will give you an API token that can be used to return data on domains.

For example, if I wanted to check Facebook.com’s rank, I can type in https://host.io/api/web/facebook.com?token=$TOKEN, replacing “$TOKEN” with your own API token.

From that, among other things, I can see that Facebook.com is currently ranked by Host.io as the #2 site in existence. Twitter.com, in comparison, is ranked as #5.

SimilarWeb

SimilarWeb, founded in 2007 by Or Offer and Nir Cohen, allows users to delve into specific details for a ranked domain. By navigating to SimilarWeb’s Top Websites list, you can see SimilarWeb’s ranking system as well as their estimated pages per visit, visitor duration, and bounce rate.

If SimilarWeb ranks the domains you’re looking to analyze or compare, the data provided can help to lead changes on your own website, for example.

The data from SimilarWeb is gathered by several sources including crawling, first-party direct measurement, and anonymous behavioral data. While SimilarWeb doesn’t carry data for all domains and websites, the data can offer insights into more popular websites, and those companies or website owners that have manually verified their traffic data with SimilarWeb.

Ahrefs

Ahrefs, one of the leading SEO research and analysis companies, offers something called Ahrefs Rank (AR), which ranks all the domain names in their vast database by the size and quality of their backlink profile.

The ranking system seems, on the surface, less comprehensive than the comparable Host.io ranking system, but both offer useful features for analysis tasks.

The Ahrefs Rank relies on the total number of backlinks a domain has cross-referenced with the quality of those backlinks. The more high quality backlinks a domain name has, the closer its AR is to the number one spot.

Access to Ahrefs Rank is available for free for a domain name that you own, but to compare your Ahrefs Rank with an unrelated domain, you will need to register for a premium plan, starting from $99 per month.

Alexa

For very basic domain and website comparisons that are quick and free to access, Alexa.com is your destination. Owned by Amazon, although not to be confused with the helpful digital assistant, Alexa is one of the oldest traffic analysis companies.

Alexa ranks are accessible by visiting alexa.com/siteinfo/example.com, replacing example.com with the domain you wish to analyze. The Alexa ranking system is regarded as relatively inaccurate for any domain not ranked in its top 100,000.

To be ranked in the top 100,000 websites, you have to receive significant traffic. For websites outside the top 100,000, the rankings give a general signal of the traffic the site receives, but little aside from this.

As I mentioned in the opening paragraph, I am a domain name analyst and consultant. These tools play a highly critical role in the suite of services that I regularly use, in particular for finding newsworthy features for my blog.

By using Host.io’s monthly domain ranking database updates, for example, I can track the progress of newly developed premium domain names in terms of popularity growth before writing about those sales.

One such example is Stereo.com, a domain name acquired for a six-figure sum by a new social platform that I noticed while filtering Host.io’s ranking list. The name has now been developed and is climbing the Host.io ranking, currently ranked at just outside 1.1 million.

This may not be a traditional usage example that you would expect from one of these services, but I believe it shows the versatility of the likes of SimilarWeb, Host.io, or Ahrefs for producing creative data for hundreds of scenarios.

IPinfo team says thanks to James Iles, a domain name analyst, consultant, and leading domain industry blogger who writes interesting blog posts about domain name data at JamesNames.com.