If you’ve checked how popular a website is, you’ve probably seen a rank from one of three free lists: Tranco, Google’s Chrome UX Report or the Majestic Million. They’re often treated as if they measured the same thing. They don’t. Each counts something different, and they disagree more than most people expect. We compared their whole top million, about three million entries in all, from the lists of 1 and 2 October 2026 and the Chrome UX Report of August 2026.
The short version:
- Only 112 sites are in the top 1,000 of all three lists, and 1,231 in the top 10,000 of all three.
- 361 of Tranco’s top 1,000 aren’t in the Chrome UX Report’s top million at all. They are names machines look up, such as content delivery networks, DNS servers and update services, not sites people open.
- 145 of the 817 sites in Chrome’s top-1,000 bucket aren’t in the Majestic Million: sites many people visit but almost nobody links to.
- Side by side, the rankings correlate weakly: 0.50 between Tranco and Majestic, 0.39 between Tranco and Chrome, 0.23 between Chrome and Majestic. A correlation of 1 would mean the same order.
What each list counts
| List | What it counts | Published | Shape |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tranco | A blend of five rankings, over 30 days | Daily | Exact positions |
| Chrome UX Report | Visits by Chrome users | Monthly | Buckets: 1,000, 5,000, 10,000… |
| Majestic Million | Separate networks that link to a site | Daily | Exact positions |
So a Tranco rank is a blend. Part of it is visits (the Chrome UX Report). Part is DNS lookups: Cloudflare Radar, Farsight and Cisco Umbrella see how often a name is asked of their resolvers. And part is links (Majestic). Tranco averages its sources over 30 days, which makes it steady and hard to game, the reason researchers cite it (Tranco’s methodology, read 18 October 2026). The Chrome UX Report’s ranks come from the CrUX top lists, and Majestic publishes its million every day.
How much they agree
Of each list’s top 1,000, the share the other two also put in their top 1,000:
| Top 1,000 of | In Tranco’s | In Chrome’s | In Majestic’s |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tranco (1,000 sites) | — | 20% | 38% |
| Chrome UX Report (817) | 24% | — | 14% |
| Majestic (928) | 41% | 13% | — |
And of each list’s top 10,000, the share in the other two’s top 10,000:
| Top 10,000 of | In Tranco’s | In Chrome’s | In Majestic’s |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tranco (9,939 sites) | — | 40% | 37% |
| Chrome UX Report (8,229) | 48% | — | 17% |
| Majestic (9,796) | 38% | 14% | — |
Chrome’s top 1,000 holds 817 sites, not 1,000, because Chrome ranks addresses such as www.google.com and mail.google.com separately; we counted each site once. Tranco agrees most with the others because it is partly built from them. The two that share nothing, Chrome and Majestic, agree least: only 14% of Chrome’s top 1,000 is in Majestic’s.
Most of the time, the lists at least know the same sites. Nearly all of Chrome’s top 1,000 (99.9%) are somewhere in Tranco’s top million, and 82% are somewhere in Majestic’s. But 36% of Tranco’s top 1,000 are nowhere in Chrome’s top million.
Why they disagree
Machines, not people
The top of Tranco that Chrome doesn’t list at all reads like the plumbing of the internet: akamai.net, fbcdn.net, googlevideo.com, gtld-servers.net, root-servers.net, windowsupdate.com, ntp.org, apple-dns.net. Phones, computers and smart devices ask DNS for these names thousands of times a day, so the DNS-based lists inside Tranco rank them high. Nobody opens them in a browser, so Chrome doesn’t. The cloud services of home security cameras show up the same way.
Links, not visits
The 78 sites in Majestic’s top 1,000 that aren’t in Chrome’s top million are mostly names the web links to without visiting. Some are short links (youtu.be, amzn.to, fb.me). Others are names that kept their links for years after the site moved or closed: geocities.com, macromedia.com, sun.com, guardian.co.uk. And some are makers of plugins and themes credited at the foot of many sites.
Visits, not links
The 145 sites in Chrome’s top-1,000 bucket that Majestic doesn’t list are mostly film piracy and adult sites. They draw large audiences but change domain often, so few other sites link to any one name. We don’t name them here.
Different shapes
Tranco and Majestic give exact positions. Chrome gives buckets, so a site in its top-1,000 bucket could be third or 990th. Chrome also ranks each address on its own, so a busy subdomain can outrank the site it belongs to.
Which rank should you trust?
It depends on what you’re asking:
- Do people actually visit it? The Chrome UX Report. It counts real visits, but only from Chrome users who share usage statistics, and in broad buckets.
- Is it an established site the web links to? Majestic. Links take years to build and are hard to fake at scale, though old and redirected names keep theirs.
- One rank for everything? Tranco is the steadiest single rank and the one research uses. Just remember that part of it counts machines, not people.
A site that is high in all three lists is very likely a real, popular website. A site that is high in only one deserves a second look: check which list it is, and what that list counts.
How we use these lists
When you check a site’s popularity, CheckAnySite shows each list’s rank with the date of the list, and the best band any of them gives. We never turn a rank into a visit count: none of these lists counts visits in a way that would allow it. More on that in how much traffic a website gets.
How we measured
- The lists as we imported them on 2 October 2026: Tranco’s list of 1 October, the Majestic Million of 2 October and the Chrome UX Report of August 2026, 2,984,750 entries in all.
- Each name reduced to the domain it is registered under, so www.example.com and shop.example.com count as example.com, keeping its best rank in each list.
- Tiers of the top 1,000, 10,000, 100,000 and million. A Chrome bucket counts in the tier it ends in.
- Correlation: Spearman’s rank correlation on the sites both lists rank, with ties averaged.
What this doesn’t tell you
- One snapshot. The lists change daily or monthly; these are early October 2026.
- Tranco isn’t independent of the other two, so part of its agreement with them is by construction.
- Our domain rule handles common country suffixes such as co.uk, but not every public suffix, so a few names may be grouped wrongly.
- Chrome’s figures come only from Chrome users who share usage statistics.
See where any site ranks in each list: the Website Traffic Checker shows its band and every list’s rank, with the date of each.