The Alexa Traffic Rank (also known as Alexa Rank) of popular websites was widely considered the industry standard and was used across a large swath of internet users and industries to assist in research and help develop products and systems. In December 2021, the Alexa website list had been available for more than 25 years when Amazon announced the impending cessation of the service. In May 2022, the service was retired permanently.
Akamai is one of the largest providers of content delivery, compute, and security services in the industry and provides services via its massive global network. As a result, Akamai has unique visibility into internet activity and can use anonymized DNS and other data in its analysis of popular domains. Additional anonymized traffic from service provider partners adds hundreds of billions more queries to fuel our analytical tools.
This large volume of data, along with other data from Akamai sources, equips us to make informed inferences about domain name popularity. Our global presence also allows analyses to be carried out at a regional level to incorporate nuanced differences among countries and languages — and major differences between residential and business users — into the process for allowlisting domains.
