Believe it or not, TikTok has beaten Google as the most visited website in 2021

TikTok has slowly but surely become one of the biggest platforms for most of the younger generation online. It’s gotten so big in fact, that according to Cloudflare, the web performance and security firm, TikTok is the most popular website in the world right now.

In Cloudflare’s 2021 Year in Review, they found that TikTok has pushed Google down to just the number two spot. Remember, this includes all of Google’s services, such as Maps, Photos, News, Books and so forth. TikTok, who finished 2020 as the seventh most popular domain last year, is now the undisputed number one website in the world, spending the majority of the last six months on top of the charts. With TikTok now moving to the number one spot, Facebook has also dropped from second to third, with Microsoft moving from third to fourth and Apple going from fourth to fifth.

It’s not even the only crown that TikTok achieved this year. Cloudflare’s report also highlighted that TikTok is now the most popular social media platform too, knocking Facebook off its perch to second place. That doesn’t necessarily mean that there’s more users on TikTok than Facebook, but rather that the video sharing platform got more internet traffic compared to Facebook. And it got a little worse for Facebook during that major October outage it went through, as the platform’s downtime was so big it caused it to drop a place to number four in the overall website charts for a whole week, something that has never happened to Facebook since September 2020. Twitter meanwhile got a small resurge, overtaking Instagram for fourth place, with YouTube above it.

Other interesting findings from the 2021 Cloudflare Year in Review include Netflix continuing to solidify its position at the top of the streaming charts, holding off YouTube and Roku. Netflix still had more traffic this year than YouTube, mostly thanks to the wildly popular Squid Game series. Overall, Netflix is also the seventh most popular domain in 2021, with the weekends especially seeing more traffic on the streaming platform.

On top of that, WhatsApp is still the most popular chat platform, but Cloudflare points out that because Facebook Messenger falls under Facebook and iMessage falls under Apple, it’s hard to accurately measure how strong WhatsApp’s lead is. Snapchat meanwhile is considered a social media platform despite a big chunk of it being for messaging too, and so technically doesn’t count; Cloudflare though does say that it would’ve been number two behind WhatsApp. Telegram though is officially the second most popular chat domain according to Cloudflare, with Signal taking third place following a surge in popularity this year.

If you’re curious for more details on the world’s internet patterns this past twelve months, you can check out the full details of Cloudflare’s 2021 Year in Review on their website.