Most Visited Websites in the US (2026): The Complete Top Sites List and What Changed Since 2012

What are the most visited websites in the US in 2026? Google and YouTube still dominate, but the rest of the list looks very different from when we first published it in 2012. Reddit is now third, ChatGPT has broken into the top 10, and names like MySpace and AOL have vanished. Here’s the latest top sites list, and how it compares with 2012.

Quick answer: The most visited websites in the US are Google, YouTube, Reddit, Facebook and Amazon, followed by Yahoo, Instagram, Wikipedia, ChatGPT and X (Twitter), based on Semrush traffic data for August 2026.

Top most visited websites in the US (August 2026)

This ranking uses Semrush’s estimate of monthly visits from users in the United States. We’ve left out adult websites, which also appear in the top 20.

Traffic estimates differ between tools such as Semrush, Similarweb and Ahrefs, so treat the visit numbers as approximate. The order of the top few sites is consistent across all of them.

What’s changed since 2012

When we first wrote this post in October 2012, it was based on comScore’s monthly list of the top 50 US web properties (shown in the image above). Comparing the two lists shows how much the web has changed:

• Google is still number one, and YouTube (owned by Google) is a clear second.
• Reddit has exploded. It barely registered in 2012 and is now the third most visited website in the US, helped by Google showing more Reddit threads in search results.
• AI has arrived. ChatGPT, which launched in late 2022, already gets around a billion US visits a month.
• Social media has shifted. Facebook is still huge, but Instagram, TikTok and X now share the attention. MySpace, which was still in the 2012 top 50, has disappeared.
• Old portals faded. AOL and Ask were big in 2012. Yahoo survives mainly through news, mail and finance.
• Shopping went global. Amazon and Walmart are joined by Temu, the Chinese bargain marketplace that launched in the US in 2022.
• Private search is growing. DuckDuckGo now gets more US visits than Bing.

Most visited websites by category

• Search: Google, DuckDuckGo, Bing
• Video: YouTube, TikTok
• Social: Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, X, LinkedIn
• Shopping: Amazon, Walmart, Temu
• Information: Wikipedia, Yahoo, Weather.com
• AI tools: ChatGPT

Want the ChatGPT details? Read our comparison of ChatGPT Plus vs free.

How website traffic is measured

No one outside a company knows its exact traffic. Rankings like this come from analytics companies that estimate visits using browser panels, clickstream data and other signals. comScore used a panel of US internet users in 2012. Today tools like Semrush and Similarweb combine several data sources. If you run a website, you can check your own real traffic in Google Analytics or Search Console, and see estimates for competitors with SEO tools.

Frequently asked questions

What is the most visited website in the US?

Google.com, with around 24.5 billion US visits a month, more than twice as many as YouTube in second place.

Is ChatGPT one of the most visited websites in the US?

Yes. ChatGPT is ranked about 9th in the US with roughly 1 billion visits a month, ahead of X (Twitter) and TikTok.

What is the most visited website in the world?

Google is the most visited website worldwide too, followed by YouTube. Globally, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Wikipedia also rank near the top (see Wikipedia’s list of most-visited websites).