How the biggest websites get their traffic
Traffic-source, device and geography shares from hap.io's measured full reports, November 2026.
Ask how a giant website gets its visitors and the usual guess is "Google sends them". For most of the web's biggest properties, that is backwards. In hap.io's measured reports, the giants overwhelmingly feed themselves: youtube.com arrives 91% direct, twitch.tv 86%, netflix.com 85% — people type the name, tap the icon, or follow a link inside the product itself. Search is the side door, not the front one.
The exceptions prove the rule, and they are exactly the sites whose product is being found rather than opened. wikipedia.org takes 59% of its visits from search — almost nobody wakes up intending to visit Wikipedia; they search a question and land there. reddit.com is the only other giant in the measured set where search (51%) beats direct (42%): discussions surface in results, and the visit follows the query.
Sources, devices and home markets
| Website | Direct | Search | Mobile share | Largest country |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| youtube.com | 91% | 7% | 62% | United States (22%) |
| wikipedia.org | 37% | 59% | 70% | United States (27%) |
| reddit.com | 42% | 51% | 61% | United States (47%) |
| amazon.com | 74% | 14% | 55% | United States (85%) |
| baidu.com | 75% | 16% | 10% | China (95%) |
| twitch.tv | 86% | 6% | 11% | United States (24%) |
| github.com | 64% | 20% | 19% | United States (19%) |
| bbc.com | 64% | 20% | 74% | United States (30%) |
| whatsapp.com | 83% | 10% | 10% | Brazil (20%) |
| duckduckgo.com | 92% | 5% | 88% | United States (53%) |
| booking.com | 67% | 8% | 57% | United States (11%) |
| nytimes.com | 71% | 22% | 64% | United States (70%) |
| chatgpt.com | 83% | 11% | 15% | United States (21%) |
| samsung.com | 78% | 17% | 89% | United States (21%) |
The phone split follows the job
Device shares are just as revealing. Sites people check in passing are phone-first: samsung.com's web traffic is 89% mobile, duckduckgo.com 88%, bbc.com 74% and wikipedia.org 70%. Sites that are a place you sit down to stay on the big screen — twitch.tv is only 11% mobile on the web (its viewing happens in apps and on TVs), github.com 19%, and chatgpt.com, a work tool used at desks, 15%. whatsapp.com is the extreme at 10% mobile: its website is mostly the companion screen for a phone app, so the "mobile" product barely touches the mobile web at all.
Home-market gravity
Geography splits the giants into nationals and globals. baidu.com is 95% one country (China) and amazon.com 85% one country (the United States); ebay.com is 81% American. The true globals look completely different: youtube.com's largest market is only 22% of its traffic, and booking.com's largest — the United States — is just 11%, the flattest distribution in the set, exactly what you would expect of a travel marketplace selling every country to every other country. When you compare two sites' headline visit counts, it is worth asking which shape sits underneath: a national champion and a global platform with the same total are very different businesses.
Every figure above is read from the site's own hap.io report, where the full breakdown — all five traffic sources, five countries, and the monthly trend — is published. Start from the most-visited ranking or look any site up on the homepage.