The Internet, Indexed & Curated
A Definitive Directory of the Modern Web.
For eighteen years, ListOfWebsites has hand-verified every entry across 487 categories — so researchers, marketers, and curious explorers never waste a click on a dead link, a scam, or a low-quality page.
- Founded
- 2009 · Portland, OR
- Curators
- 14 editors, 60+ specialists
- Last audit
- Q2 2024 · 14 months
By the Numbers · Verified, October 2025
Eighteen years of curation, weighed and counted.
- 52,840 verified websites indexed across 487 categories, every entry hand-checked
- 487 categories, from News to Vintage Synth Manuals mainstream to ultra-niche, no topic unfiled
- 380,000+ monthly readers average session of 4.2 minutes per visitor
- 11,200 dead links retired, Q2 2024 audit a 14-month sweep of the full directory, completed in June
The Index · A–Z
Browse the directory, letter by letter.
A small slice of the full 487-category index. Every entry below links to a curated subdirectory of sites our editors have verified, ranked, and re-audited within the last twelve months.
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001
News & Current Affairs1,284 sites
Independent newsrooms, beat reporting, investigative longform, and the rare regional daily still publishing daily.
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002
Independent Shopping2,061 sites
Direct-to-consumer makers, single-shop retailers, and small-batch ateliers with verifiable ownership and HTTPS.
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003
Essays & Longform876 sites
Personal sites, public notebooks, and literary magazines publishing essays longer than 2,000 words on a regular cadence.
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004
Open-Source Geology Tools94 sites
Cross-platform datasets, mineralogy calculators, and field-mapping utilities maintained by university labs and consortia.
Site of the Day · No. 5,847
Today's pick: The Public Domain Review.
An online journal devoted to the exploration of works that have fallen into the public domain — nineteenth-century engravings, abandoned patents, out-of-print scientific pamphlets — reframed by contemporary essayists and historians.
It earns today's slot for doing what few cultural sites still do: curating patiently, citing every image to its holding institution, and refusing the churn of the algorithm feed. We first listed it in 2012; this is its fourth appearance as Site of the Day.
Read the full editorial note →
How We Vet · Chapter I
Every listing passes a 27-point quality check.
ListOfWebsites is not auto-generated. A team of 14 curators and 60+ category specialists reviews every submission by hand, then re-reviews it on a rolling cadence. Below, four of the twenty-seven criteria we check before a site earns a row in the index.
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i.
Transport & Ownership
HTTPS with a valid certificate, a registered domain held for at least twelve months, and a named human contact in the WHOIS record or About page. Anonymous single-page projects are filed under a separate "Experiments" branch.
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ii.
Load & Accessibility
First-contentful paint under 2.5 seconds on a throttled 3G connection, no console errors on a cold load, and a passing Lighthouse accessibility score of 90 or above.
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iii.
Content Depth
At least fifteen substantive pages of original content, written in full sentences, with citations where claims are made. Aggregators and pure link-blogs are catalogued but flagged accordingly.
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iv.
Editorial Survival
Evidence of a publishing cadence: an active RSS feed, dated posts within the last ninety days, and a maintenance log or changelog we can monitor between full audits.
Sites that fail any point are not listed. Sites that drift after listing are re-audited on a 12-month rotation — the same rotation that retired 11,200 entries during our 2023–2024 sweep.