NomansiteNews / 8 June 2026
The question we started with
Ask the web who builds the web and you get advertising. Every catalogue of agencies is filled by the agencies themselves — so we went looking for a way to count instead of asking.
Try to find out which studios actually make websites, and in which country, and how many. You will find directories where every entry is written by its subject, ranked by how much the subject paid. You will find award galleries, beautiful and tiny. And you will find Wikidata, which knows 119 design firms with a website for the entire world — an encyclopedia does not describe this industry at all.
That absence is strange. Web studios build the thing the whole world reads, and there is no register of them. Not a ranked list — a register: who exists, where, and what they have actually made.
Why a self-reported list cannot be it
A directory that companies fill in about themselves measures one thing: willingness to fill in a directory. It rewards whoever writes the longest description and pays for placement, and it says nothing about the work. That is a fine business and a useless instrument.
So the question we started with was not «how do we build a better directory». It was: what about a studio can be observed from outside, without asking it anything? Everything this project has done since follows from that question.