A common idea about the internet is that it keeps replacing itself, and that the next huge site is being built right now by a few people nobody has heard of. I wanted to see whether that still happens. I took the 40 most-visited websites for every year from 2010 to 2026 and looked up the year each one launched.
In 2010, nine of the top 40 were five years old or younger. In 2019, on the same ranking, none of them were. Young sites are back in the top 40 now, and three of this year’s four are AI assistants.
What a young site at the top looked like
YouTube is the clearest example. It launched in 2005, and by the summer of 2010 it was the third most-visited site in the world, behind Google and Facebook. It was five years old.
It had company. Twitter, WordPress.com, Bing and VK were all in the 2010 top 40, and all of them had launched since 2005.
No single ranking covers the whole period. Alexa published one until it closed in 2022, and Similarweb’s is available from 2022. The two measure traffic differently, so I have kept them apart instead of joining them into one series. Both exist for 2022, which gives one year to compare them. Here are the young sites in each list.
Out of the 40 most-visited websites each year. AI assistants are marked in orange. The two rankings are compiled differently and are not directly comparable.
On Alexa’s lists there are nine in 2010. The number falls until there are none in 2016, and it stays at or near zero until the lists end in 2022. Similarweb’s lists start with one, the same site Alexa has that year, and reach four by 2026.
Four years with none
From 2016 to 2019 Alexa had no young sites in its top 40. The one in 2020 is Panda TV, a Chinese streaming site, and it probably shouldn’t count: Panda TV shut down in March 2019, more than a year before Alexa ranked it in the top 40. I left it in because it is in the data, but it says more about the quality of Alexa’s later lists than about the web.
Looking at it by launch year gives the same picture. Of all the sites launched between 2011 and 2016, two reached the top 40 within five years. One was Panda TV. The other was Delta Search, a browser hijacker that set itself as people’s home page.
Sites from those years did get big, but it took them longer. Twitch launched in 2011 and reached the top 40 in 2017. Zoom launched in 2013 and got there in 2020, during the pandemic.
Does the five-year cut-off matter?
Five years is an arbitrary line, so I tried others. With a three-year cut-off there are no young sites from 2014 through 2022. With seven years the count still falls to zero in 2019. If I use the top 25 sites instead of the top 40, there are none from 2015 through 2021. The gap is there in every version.
The age of the list as a whole shows the same thing without a cut-off.
Age is the year of the ranking minus the year the site launched. The two rankings are compiled differently, so the lines are not joined.
On Alexa’s lists the median site in the top 40 was 11 years old in 2010 and 17 in 2022. On Similarweb’s it was 18.5 in 2022 and is 20.5 in 2026. Twelve of this year’s top 40 launched in the 1990s.
The new arrivals are AI assistants
ChatGPT launched at the end of 2022 and was in Similarweb’s top 40 a few months later. By April 2025 it was the fifth most-visited site in the world, and it still is.
Two more followed. Google’s Gemini, which launched as Bard, and Anthropic’s Claude both arrived in 2023, and both are in the 2026 top 40. That makes three AI assistants among the four young sites on this year’s list. For comparison, Alexa’s lists had no young sites of any kind in five of the six years from 2016 to 2021.
The young sites that aren’t AI assistants are worth naming, because there are so few. TikTok is on both 2022 lists at five years old, and it is the only social network launched after Instagram to get into the top 40 that quickly. Temu, a shopping site launched in 2022, is the fourth young site this year. Max, the streaming service that began as HBO Max in 2020, was on the 2024 list and has since dropped out of the top 40.
Leaving aside Panda TV and Delta Search, nothing that launched between Instagram in 2010 and TikTok in 2017 broke in young. Since ChatGPT, three of the five sites that have done it are AI assistants.
I expected to find that the web had stopped producing new giants, and for most of the last decade the lists do show that. I did not expect the run to end with one kind of product. As of April, the two youngest sites in the top 40 are Gemini and Claude.