400 million domains: how do you find the good websites?

At the end of June 2026 there were 401.6 million registered domain names on the internet, according to the industry's quarterly count. That was 9.1 million more than three months earlier, and almost 30 million more than a year before. In one quarter alone, 12.7 million new .com and .net names were registered.

Not every domain becomes a website. Plenty are parked, held for later, or bought to protect a brand. But the number of real, working sites keeps climbing too, and it's never been easier to make one. A shop, a portfolio, a side project or a tool can go from idea to live address in an afternoon.

That's great for makers. It's hard on everyone else.

Why new sites are so hard to find

Search engines are good at answering questions. They're less good at showing you what's new. A site launched last week has no links pointing to it, no history and no reviews, so it sits well below sites that have been around for years, however good it is.

Social feeds help for a day or two, then the post scrolls away. App stores have charts and categories. Most of the web has nothing like that: there's no shelf where new websites sit next to each other so you can compare them.

What comparing websites should look like

If you were choosing between ten new sites that do the same job, you'd want to know a few things at a glance:

• Is the name any good? A short, clear domain is easier to remember, type and trust.
• Does it work? Is it fast, secure and usable on a phone?
• What do other people think? Not star ratings from bots, but real visitors saying whether it was worth their time.
• Is anyone using it? A site people come back to is a better bet than one nobody visits.

And you'd want to see the site itself, without opening twenty tabs.

A player card for every website

That's the idea behind URL Cards. Anyone can add a site, and it gets a player card: an overall rating, a rarity, a domain grade and stats for creativity, usability, scalability, opinion, visits and interaction. Every card sits in one public pool, ranked against every other, so you can browse the best, the newest, the most visited, or the hidden gems nobody has found yet.

Open a card and you can preview the site right there, rate it, and leave a stamp in its guest book. You can also see who else is browsing at the same time.

For people who make websites

If you've built something, add it. It's free and takes a few seconds: the site is checked, measured and given its card straight away. If it's your domain, you can claim the card by adding a DNS record, then set its image, name and bio. You can also put a badge on your site that links back to the card.

The web keeps getting bigger. We think the good new sites deserve somewhere to be seen.

Figures: [DNIB.com, Q2 2026 Domain Name Industry Brief](https://investor.verisign.com/news-releases/news-release-details/dnibcom-reports-internet-has-4016-million-domain-name), published 23 July 2026.