Download websites that use Akismet

About Akismet

Every WordPress installation ships with Akismet in the box, which makes the interesting question not whether the plugin exists but whether anybody switched it on. Activation needs an account and a key, and commercial sites are expected to pay for one, so an active spam filter is a small but real piece of evidence that somebody is spending money to keep a site usable.

Detection here reads the traces an active installation leaves in served pages rather than files sitting on a server, which we cannot see. The distinction cuts both ways. A dormant copy in a plugin folder is invisible to us and should be, because a dormant copy means nothing, while a site that hardens its output and suppresses plugin fingerprints is invisible to us as well, and that one is a genuine miss. The count is a floor, weighted toward sites that leave their stack legible.

As of September 2026 we detect Akismet on 120,074 sites, 66,096 of them in United States, with the domain mix leaning toward .com. Spam filtering is a signal about site type before it is a signal about geography. A site running it accepts input from strangers through comments or forms, which means it publishes something that attracts an audience, and it has an owner who noticed the resulting mess and dealt with it. Brochure sites with no input surface rarely appear in this population.

The version field is where the list becomes actionable. We record 51 distinct version strings across these installations, with 4.1.2 the release reported most often, which is the normal shape for a plugin whose updates run automatically for some owners and are pinned by others. A site several releases behind is usually a site where automatic updates were deliberately switched off, and that in turn suggests a managed environment, a cautious agency, or an owner who stopped paying attention. Any of the three is a reason to make contact, and which one you are looking at can often be settled by what else is running on the domain.

The rest of the record is straightforward. Akismet has been operated by Automattic since 2005 under a Proprietary model, written in PHP for the platform it grew up with, and offered beyond that platform through an API, so a share of the sites here are not content sites at all but forms and applications calling the same service. Version strings can be stale or hidden, and a paid subscription cannot be confirmed from outside, so read the presence of the filter as evidence of an attended site rather than proof of a billing relationship.

A per-domain lookup tells you that one site filters its comments. The downloadable list gives you every detected installation with its version, alongside the themes, hosts, ecommerce tools and other plugins on the same domains, which is what separating maintained sites from neglected ones requires at a scale where the difference is worth money.