• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, February 15, 2018

Compiled from analysis of 10 national Google indexes, Wikipedia.org took the overall ranking for the most visible website in Google search results based on a study released this week. In fact, Wikipedia is the most visible in eight out of 10 countries.

The Searchmetrics study found the second most visible websites as YouTube, Facebook, Google, and Apple. The measure of search visibility used in the analysis scores how prominently a website appears in organic search results.

The findings are based on the organic rankings of the millions of keywords that Searchmetrics tracks in each country weekly. The calculation for the SEO Visibility score is based on the number of times a domain appears in the search engine results pages across the keyword set, its prominence within those SERPs, and the competitiveness of the keyword.

Google's index, per Searchmetrics, has its own algorithm for each country, but the search agency zoomed out to take a global perspective to show how each website dominates across national boundaries. The report brings together data from 10 countries to determine the most visible domains during the past 12 months. It also compares this year's ranking to 2016's.

Twitter came in as the big loser, globally, but held its spot in the top five in the United States. Its predominance in visibility during the past year dropped dramatically. Globally, it dropped out of the list of the top five and most visible domains and was replaced at No. 4 with Google. It still holds No. 5 in the U.S.

In the U.S. the most visible are Wikipedia.org, YouTube, Facebook, Google, and Twitter.  

Newcomer Amazon now has domains listed in the top ten most visible sites in five national Google indexes. Those countries include the United States, Italy, United Kingdom, France and Germany. It places at No. 7 in the U.S. 

About 76% of the top five domains across all indexes excluding the United States use the top level domain of either .com or .org.

Marketers can find the complete list here.