The U.S. government provides a live look at traffic on .gov domains.
A government website shows real-time stats for federal websites.
There are lots of sites that estimate traffic to popular websites over time. But did you know you can get verified and real-time data for traffic on .gov sites?
Analytics.usa.gov is a website run by the U.S. federal government that aggregates data from Google Analytics for government agency websites. It shows data from 400 executive branch domains and 5,700 total websites, including every cabinet department. It shows:
- Live traffic
- Device, operating system, and browser data
- Current visitor locations
- Top pages and top downloads
You can also download traffic data for all of the websites for the past 30 days.
There are some interesting things to learn from this data source.
First, because it covers a wide variety of sites with traffic from across the country and demographics, you can get a good idea of the current market share for different device types, browsers, and operating systems.
Second, it’s interesting to see trends as sites become more popular, sometimes for a flash. When the government launched its free covid test site at covidtests.gov, more than 1 million people were on the site simultaneously. The USPS website is usually the most popular, although the CDC and NIH sites are popular right now, and irs.gov is popular this time of the year.
I also found the 30-day data interesting. Nearly all versions of example.gov are registered by third parties as examplegov.com. I found one domain that was not and registered it as a test. (I’ve since deleted it.) It received only a modest amount of traffic, but it was more of a b2b domain than a consumer one. Smartly, the U.S. Postal Service registered uspsgov.com.
