It is hard to answer this question. It is hard to do in a straightforward way.
Most of all, because it is not quite clear what we exactly mean when we say “websites in the US”.
Depending on the circ*mstances this can equally be a website:
- Hosted in the US;
- Physically managed from the US;
- Engaged in business in the US;
- Any combination of all three.
So, there is no clear definition of a US website.
A website is something that can be located in different places depending on how you look at it.The location of a given website may vary based on the specific perspective/criterion.
For instance, let’s take a website hosted in the US, managed from Singapore, and exclusively involved in the EU market.
Where does this website belong? US, EU, or Singapore?
Another example would be the website hosted in the EU and doing business/being managed in the US. Is this an American website?
Depends.
If the criterion is hostingthen:
- a website is an American in the first scenario;
- and European in the second.
Alternatively, if the criterion is the place of business/management then:
- the website is Singaporean/European in the first case;
- and American in the second.
So, yes, basically this depends.
As additional information, we can note that thenumber of hosts in the US was505,000,000in 2012.
Today, in 2021 this number is probably way higher.
In parallel, when we say that a particular website is located somewhere we might also mean the domain name associated with that country.
In a standard case, a local website usually uses the national top-level domain (like co.uk, .ca, or .de). But US TLD which.usis not as popular as other country TLDs, so basing the count of the US websites on it would probably be unreliable.
What we can do instead is to look at the total number of domains managed by US registrars. Based on this specific criterion there are133,361,676websites in the US.
This is the number of domains registered by the US registrars as of August 2021.
