Cloudflare has expanded its Radar Domain Rankings with two new Trending Domains lists, designed to surface domains that are gaining popularity rather than simply those with the largest overall user base. The new lists — Trending Today and Trending This Week — are available on the Cloudflare Radar dashboard and via the Radar API.

The existing Domain Rankings, launched in 2022, use a machine learning model applied to anonymized data from Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 resolver to estimate the relative size of the user population accessing each domain. While the top 100 list is updated daily per location, those rankings tend to be dominated by stable, globally popular names such as Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, and TikTok. The new trending lists aim to capture the opposite: domains experiencing a surge in interest, whether from a sudden event or steady growth over time.

To build the lists, Cloudflare's team had to answer three questions: what kind of popularity change to capture, what baseline to measure against, and how to quantify the change. Their analysis of ranking volatility showed that smaller top lists (e.g., top 100) are far more stable day-to-day than larger ones (e.g., top 10,000). This meant the daily trending list needed to look beyond the most popular domains, but not so far into the long tail that rankings become unreliable due to small query volumes. The appropriate list size varies by location; for example, the Worldwide list draws from the top 20,000 domains, while Brazil uses 10,000, Angola 5,000, and the Faroe Islands just 500.

The team also found a clear weekly pattern: the biggest rank changes occur from Friday to Saturday and from Sunday to Monday. Comparing a domain's rank on a given day to its rank on the same weekday the previous week would miss these weekend effects. However, simply comparing to the previous day would repeatedly flag domains that oscillate in rank without any sustained growth.

The compromise for Trending Today is to compare a domain's current daily rank against its best rank over the previous four days, then calculate the percentage change. This captures recent spikes — including weekend effects — while filtering out domains that merely bounce around from day to day.

Trending This Week takes a different approach to identify steady growth. Rather than comparing the current rank directly to the best rank of the prior week, the calculation uses a weighted average of daily rank improvements over six days, giving more weight to recent days. This favors domains that keep improving their position, with particular emphasis on the most recent trends.

Real-world examples

The lists were compiled for the eventful period of June 21–24, 2023, to illustrate how the trending data behaves in practice.

On June 22, nba.com appeared in the Trending Today list for 28 locations, including the United States, Austria, Australia, and Japan, reflecting interest in the NBA Draft 2023.

On Saturday, June 24, domain rt.com (a Russian news site in English) and liveuamap.com (an interactive map of Ukraine) were trending in multiple locations, likely related to the events around the Wagner group on June 23–24. The domain jetphotos.com also trended that day in Russia, Norway, and Albania, tied to the same events.

More routine patterns also appeared. Gaming and streaming domains such as roblox.com, twitch.tv, and callofduty.com trended in various locations on Friday and Saturday as the weekend approached. In Croatia, five weather forecast sites appeared on the top 10 trending list for Friday, suggesting people checking weekend weather plans.

For the full-week list (June 17–23), travel-related domains such as booking.com, rentcars.com, and amadeus.com trended across multiple countries, consistent with summer vacation planning. The weather domain windy.com trended throughout the week in locations including the Dominican Republic, Saint Lucia, and Reunion, likely tied to the start of hurricane season.

Availability

Both the Trending Today and Trending This Week top 10 lists are now accessible on the Cloudflare Radar dashboard and through the Radar API.