The ccTLD map of high-authority web in 2026

We sliced the high-authority web by country code top-level domain (ccTLD) to see where the most-linked-to sites actually live. The answer is non-obvious enough to be worth writing down. Two things up front.

This is a ccTLD analysis, not a country-of-operation analysis. A site on .com, .net, or .org is not assigned a country here. That means the United States is essentially invisible on the maps below, since the vast majority of US-operated authoritative sites prefer .com. Germany, by contrast, has a strong .de habit and shows up prominently. The data is honest within its frame; just do not read "Germany has more high-DR sites than the US" into it. What it actually says is "Germany has more high-DR sites with a ccTLD than other countries with a ccTLD habit".

All shares are within the country-tagged sub-population. Roughly 44% of our high-DR domains have a parseable country code, with the rest being gTLD-based. Shares below are within that 44%. The relative ordering between countries is the load-bearing signal.

Top 25 by ccTLD share, all DR ≥ 50

This is the broad high-authority cut. Any site with our calibrated DR of 50 or higher and a ccTLD goes in.

Top 25 at DR ≥ 70 (the elite tier)

Same data, narrower cut. Only domains with a DR of 70 or higher count. The shape changes:

What stands out

Germany is the unambiguous ccTLD leader

.de runs about 11.6% of the country-tagged high-DR pool, more than the combined shares of France and the UK. This is partly population, partly the depth of the German B2B and Mittelstand web (a long tail of mid-size companies that maintain authoritative .de properties), and partly that German consumers and search engines treat a .de URL as more trustworthy than a .com for German-market businesses. Combined, those factors produce a .de corpus that is unusually rich at the high end.

At DR ≥ 70 the gap is even larger: Germany is still #1, ahead of Japan which is #2 in the elite tier despite being #3 in the broader pool.

Japan and China switch places at the top tier

In the broad cut, China is #2 and Japan is #3. At DR ≥ 70, Japan is #2 and China drops to #3. This is consistent with a pattern we see across the data: China has a very large number of moderate-DR ccTLD sites driven by ICP-compliance footers and the regulatory baseline of Chinese hosting, but proportionally fewer of them break into the elite tier. The Japanese web has a smaller installed base but a higher share of mature, deeply linked publications.

The .io anomaly

.io is the country code for the British Indian Ocean Territory, a tropical archipelago with a population of around 4,000 (almost all of them on the Diego Garcia military base). It sits at #14 in the broad cut and #16 in the elite tier. None of those sites have anything to do with the territory; .io has been adopted as a "tech startup" suffix in the 2010s and never let go.

If you maintain a .io site, your domain shares a ccTLD with one of the smallest physical territories on Earth. The IANA delegation makes this work because the operator (Internet Computer Bureau) is a UK-registered company with no obligation to serve the actual territory.

Colombia's .co is the other anomaly

.co is a country code for Colombia. It is also marketed as a brand-friendly alternative to .com because the suffix reads as "company". Colombia ranks #22 by ccTLD share at DR ≥ 70, but a substantial fraction of that count is .co registrations operated from the United States and Europe by SaaS startups, not from Colombia itself. The actual Colombian corpus is smaller than the count suggests; the opposite of what you would assume from the rank.

Where the United States actually appears

.us makes its only appearance at #25 in the elite tier, with about 923 high-DR domains. The actual US-operated web is much larger; it lives on .com, .org, .net, .edu, .gov. Those are gTLDs and do not appear on this map. If the goal is to measure US authority, this is the wrong analysis; the right one is to look at .com separately, which we plan to do in a follow-up.

European ccTLD culture is the strongest single pattern

Twelve of the top 20 in the elite tier are European country codes. Add .uk, .de, .fr, .nl, .pl, .it, .au (which we group with European-style legal frameworks), .cz, .es, .ch, .dk, .se, .at, .be together and you have most of the high-DR ccTLD pool. This is consistent with the "EU prefers ccTLDs" thesis many SEOs have argued informally: GDPR, language preferences, and consumer-side ccTLD preference combine to make European businesses far more likely to run their authoritative sites under a ccTLD than under a gTLD.

Methodology and caveats

A few honest notes:

1. Country detection is best-effort. We resolve country in this priority order: ccTLD, then HTML <html lang>, then ML-based language detection on body text, then GeoIP on the resolving server (with CDN IP ranges skipped). For this analysis we used only the ccTLD slice because that is the most defensible signal. Sites where we resolved a country through other paths are excluded.
2. Some ccTLDs are operated as gTLDs. .io (British Indian Ocean), .co (Colombia), .me (Montenegro), .tv (Tuvalu), .ai (Anguilla) are all marketed as branded TLDs. We have not tried to filter these out. The ranks are honest as ccTLD assignments but misleading as country-of-operation signals.
3. Crawl coverage matters. We over-sample Latin-script content slightly. High-authority Korean, Japanese, and Chinese sites are present but their relative position is probably understated by 10% to 20% versus a perfectly market-weighted measure.

What this implies

The most concrete takeaway for SEO and outreach work:

• For a German-market campaign, prioritize .de outreach. The authoritative German web is concentrated under .de to a degree that no other country matches. Outreach lists scraped from .com ranking pages will under-represent the available authority by a large margin.
• For a UK-market campaign, balance .uk and .com. UK businesses still split their authoritative presences across both. The pure .uk slice catches roughly half of where you should be looking.
• For a US-market campaign, ccTLD analysis is not the right tool. Use the global .com index instead. That cut is pending.

See it for any country

This data is queryable through the REST API and through the get_top_domains MCP tool with a country filter. The web UI also exposes per-country browsing at /top/countries/.

For the broader picture see the companion pieces: The 100 most-linked-to domains on the web, What runs the high-DR web in 2026, and The hidden URL shorteners holding the link graph together.