Download websites that use Disqus

About Disqus

Comments are the part of a website that owners most often decide not to build. Disqus turned that decision into a script tag. Drop an embed into the page template and the discussion thread, the moderation queue, the spam filtering and the reader login all arrive from somewhere else, hosted and maintained by a company the site owner has no other relationship with.

The nature of that trade is visible in who owns the service. Disqus now belongs to Zeta Global, a company whose business is marketing data and audience targeting rather than publishing tools, which says plainly what a comment widget is worth to the party hosting it. A site that embeds Disqus has accepted a third party script with reader identity and behaviour flowing through it on every article page. For a privacy researcher, or a compliance team assembling a vendor inventory, the placement of that script matters more than the feature list around it.

Disqus dates from 2007, is delivered as JavaScript loaded into the host page, and runs on a Freemium model where the free tier is paid for with advertising in the comment area. The economics shape the population. Publishers with real traffic tend to pay, while the free tier collects blogs and hobby projects that stopped posting long ago, so a list of Disqus sites mixes two very different audiences and needs filtering by other signals before it works as a prospect list.

As of October 2026 we record Disqus on 973 sites, and the number is an undercount of a specific kind. The embed usually lives on article and post templates rather than on a homepage, and many installations load it lazily, only once the reader scrolls to the bottom or clicks a button to reveal the thread. Crawl based detection sees what a page actually delivers, so a publisher who defers the embed behind an interaction can run Disqus across an entire site and register almost nowhere.

The reason to want the list rather than a per-domain check is comparative. A lookup confirms one site. A file of every detected installation supports the questions worth money: which competing comment and community products are taking installs, which publishers still put an ad supported third party on their article pages, and which sites could be reached with a migration offer. Cross referenced against the CMS and analytics columns of the same export, the Disqus list also separates a maintained publication from an abandoned blog, which no single domain lookup can do.