TikTok.com surpasses Google to become the most visited website in the world in 2021, ending Google’s 23 years dominance

TikTok, the Chinese viral video-sharing app that started out as a joke now, has now become the most popular app in the world. That’s not all, TikTok has also dethroned Google to become the most popular site on the planet.

According to the latest web traffic metrics data from content delivery network company Cloudflare, TikTok.com is the number one most visited website in the world in 2021, ending Google 23 year’s dominance. Cloudflare data further shows that TikTok.com ranks as the most popular domain for all of 2020 and the first part of 2021

Known in China as Douyin, TikTok is a popular video-sharing social networking service owned by Chinese company ByteDance, a Beijing-based Internet technology company founded in 2012 by Zhang Yiming.

In a blog post, Cloudflare says:

“With Alexa.com going away, if you need a domain ranking, you can get it from Cloudflare. We’ll focus on space (NASA and SpaceX flew higher), e-commerce (Amazon and Taobao rule), and social media (TikTok ‘danced’ to take the crown from Facebook). We’ll also take a little ‘bite’ on video streaming wars. Netflix is a Squid Game of its own and January 2021 was at the highest in our ranking — probably lockdown and pandemic-related.”

The metrics provided by Cloudflare further shows that TikTok first got the top spot for a day on February 17, 2021. Then 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. Later, Google took the first spot back for a few days.

But TikTok took the #1 spot again in October and November, including on Thanksgiving (November 25) and Black Friday (November 26). Below is Cloudflare list of the top 10 most visited websites for 2021:

Top 10 — Most popular domains (late) 2021

1 TikTok.com
2 Google.com
3 Facebook.com
4 Microsoft.com
5 Apple.com
6 Amazon.com
7 Netflix.com
8 YouTube.com
9 Twitter.com
10 WhatsApp.com

Top 10 — Most popular domains (late) 2020

1 Google.com
2 Facebook.com
3 Microsoft.com
4 Apple.com
5 Netflix.com*
6 Amazon.com
7 TikTok.com
8 YouTube.com
9 Instagram.com *
10 Twitter.com

The fact that a 5-year-old Chinese app is able to overtake Google further shows the tech giant is not as invincible as most people think.