TikTok dethrones Google as most visited website in the world

Big tech, big government and a lot of others outside of China may want TikTok banned, but the platform shows no signs of stopping. A new report suggests that the short-video platform topped Google as the most visited website of 2021, a feat that almost no one has been able to achieve in recent history. TikTok.com not Google.com was the most visited domain in 2021, according to Cloudflare Radar, an internet trends report compiled by distributed denial of service (DDoS) provider Cloudflare.

According to the report, TikTok.com was visited by more people in 2021 than Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon’s primary web domains. Netflix, YouTube, Twitter and WhatsApp made up the bottom four in the top 10, the report said. In comparison, TikTok.com was number seven in the top 10 most visited domains of 2020, according to last year’s version of the report, which was topped by Google, Facebook and Microsoft.

“2021 told a different story. It was on February 17, 2021 that TikTok got the top spot for a day. Back in March, TikTok got a few more days and also in May, but it was after August 10, 2021, that TikTok took the lead on most days,” the company said in a blog post. “There were some days when Google was #1, but October and November were mostly TikTok’s days, including on Thanksgiving (November 25) and Black Friday (November 26),” the post added.

Furthermore, the report said that Facebook.com — which used to be number 2 — is now a “solid number 3” in terms of traffic.

As far as web traffic goes, there are few companies that have more insight into what websites we visit than Cloudflare. The company is one of the largest cloud services providers, and is used by almost every major web service and website in the world. It made a name for itself for providing DDoS protection to websites, which would keep hackers from taking websites down by sending automated artificial traffic to their servers.

According to web research firm W3Techs, Cloudflare is used by 81.2% of all websites in the world that use content delivery networks (CDNs).