Top 10 Websites in the World 2022 and How They Get Their Traffic
I will list the top 10 websites in the world in 2022 according to Alexa rank. Note that the data comes from traffic estimation tools. Different traffic estimations tools show slightly differing graphs. Data for the traffic sources are taken from Similarweb.
The purpose is to analyze the traffic of the leaders and give insights on what are the main source channels for the websites. Let's get started.
1. Google
Google gets 94% traffic from direct visits. It is not a surprise. We can change our thought patterns and think about Google as a platform like social media where you can have your content if you choose to. The major difference is that you can put content for your followers on social media easily, but with Google, you need SEO work to place your content in front of people. In this case, they aren't necessarily your followers, but they are interested people from all over the world.
2. Youtube
Youtube receives around 80% of traffic from direct visits. Approximately 15% comes from searches. SEO is an essential for Youtube creators. Youtube is the world's second-largest search engine. Video creators must SEO optimize their videos and their channel to get more traffic from inside Youtube. If they do, this will also give traffic from Google. We can conclude that most of the 15% search volume comes directly to videos. Let's see how this happens.
This example is an interesting one. If you click on the first result, you'll land on a website where the Youtube video is embedded. Embedding your video on your website is an excellent "off-page" optimization method. This helps your videos to rank on Google.
Let's do another search.
For this search term, the first result on the search results page is a direct link to the video on Youtube.
If we go to The "All" tab (the default search results page), we can see another video is ranking on the first page. You can watch the video directly on Google. In this case, it is not the whole video but the part of the video. Google thinks that this part of the video gives the short answer to the user's question. I want to add that this video has used a Youtube SEO Trick. They used Youtube chapters.
So we have seen how crucial is search engine optimization if you want to create both textual and video content.
3. Baidu
I see Search engines, search engines everywhere. We see that China's most popular search engine is in third place.
I can't understand much about Baidu because it is literally in Chinese.
Other languages are also indexed in Baidu. Your content might be ranked on Baidu as well you you SEO optimize it for all search engines. One thing that I can tell about Baidu from my experience is that Baidu loves modern websites! I've seen that websites created with modern web technologies and blog posts written with the modern blogging platform are ranking higher in Baidu results pretty quickly.
4. Facebook
The most popular social media platform is on the 4th page.
It is not a surprise that over 80% of traffic to Facebook is direct. It is worth mentioning that over 10% of the traffic comes from search engines. We see that a lot of times brand search brings the Facebook page of the brand on the first page of Google or other search engines.
We can also see that many times popular Facebook pages and groups are being ranked on the first pages of Google for their focus keywords.
As I remember correctly Facebook was in 6th place last year. After seeing that it is losing a lot of traffic to Youtube, Facebook announced that it will focus on video. I think that video, game streaming, and other video-related features helped Facebook land in fourth place. Now Facebook wants to add short videos to compete against TikTok. Most probably you know how Facebook works and I am not going to talk about it.
I just want to add if you caught yourself using the search function of Facebook then you might think about SEO on Facebook.
You can think about SEO when you name your Facebook Page or group.
I found and joined many groups by Facebook search. Others do it as well. So it makes sense to think about what keyword your target customers will use when they will search communities and service providers of their interest.
Last but not least, keywords in your Facebook posts will help you to bring some traffic from inside Facebook search right to your posts.
All in all, SEO is not to be forgotten for Facebook as well.
5. QQ.com
A quick search gives us information that QQ is a Chinese instant messaging app. The service is provided by Tencent. QQ.com is the email service provided by the company.
When we visit the website, we get a page like this.
We can conclude from the landing page that it is a log-in-only platform. In other words, it is similar to Gmail rather than the mail + portal platform Yahoo! However, when we look up the traffic, we see that qq.com receives around 25% of the traffic from search.
Huh, surprising. Let's see how.
We will use a basic toolset that SEO professionals use. We list all the pages of the qq.com website that are indexed in Google. This is done with a simple "site:qq.com" query.
We translate the results from Chinese to English and here we have the first page.
We got this. QQ has a lot of blogs and websites on its subdomains. Here's one of them that was ranking high.
Nice website!
We unleashed the main search traffic source of the company.
This technique is used by many companies. If you can host user-generated websites on subdomains of your domain name, you'll put your domain name in front of many people. Your domain will get links and your domain rating (DR) will grow. As your domain's rating (DR) will grow it will be a magnet for more user-generated content on your website. We have an article on our website on what is a DR and why you need to care about it. Find on our websites Read it if you are interested!
6. Amazon
Shopping time! How do you use Amazon? Do you sometimes use the search inside Amazon? You guessed it ;) Amazon is the biggest search engine for products in the world. Amazon competes with Google in this regard. Amazon does not like it when people search for physical products on Google. Let's see how successful is Amazon on this.
According to the "Amazon Advertising Report" from online selling platform Jungle Scout, 74% of U.S. consumers begin their product searches on the Amazon.com site.
Check more about Amazon vs Google competition on product search
As a product search engine and as a favorite shopping destination for many shoppers Amazon is doing pretty well with direct traffic. Amazon also has one of the most widespread affiliate marketing offerings on the internet. That brings considerable referral traffic to the website.
Amazon's SEO credits and amazons sellers' hard work on Amazon SEO brings around 25% of the overall traffic.
That's a pretty good number indeed.
We are in 6th place and SEM (Search engine marketing) shows a strong presence.
7. Taobao
Taobao is Alibaba owned B2C shopping platform. It is similar to eBay. Taobao's mall - Tmall.com has a lot of high-quality brand shops and ranks in 12th place according to Alexa's rankings.
There's interesting about Taobao's traffic. Unlike Amazon, the referral traffic is bigger than the search traffic. Search traffic gets the 10% of the overall traffic.
As Taobao has a product search engine obviously product listings must be optimized for Taobao SEO. However, if you are not selling products on Taobao you'll not be interested in this.
8. Yahoo!
Best known for its portal, search engine, and email service, Yahoo is in 8th place. Yahoo's search engine is now powered by Bing.
The search traffic that Yahoo receives is around 10%. Interestingly, Yahoo keeps the search box on top of all investigated portal pages. This may nudge users to make the subsequent searches on Yahoo! How many users will do it only employees of Yahoo! can know it.
9. Wikipedia
It should not be surprising that the world's open encyclopedia is in the top 10. Guess from where Wikipedia gets the most traffic? Right, from search engines. Over 85% of the traffic comes from search engines.
10. Bilibili
The last on the list is a Chinese popular video sharing and streaming portal. It gets over 10% of traffic from search engines. As is expected for video portals, direct traffic percentage is high.
Here is what it looks like.
Conclusion
We see the world's leading websites get most of their traffic from direct visits. This is expected.
The second-largest traffic source for almost all websites was search traffic. The exception was in the case of Taobao. Other forms of traffic were inferior to search traffic. I guess that should be reinforcement on how important is the search traffic.
And let me remind you that search traffic is usually warm traffic. That means that visits that come from search engines are more likely to convert.
