Download websites that use OpenStreetMap

About OpenStreetMap

A map on a website is rarely a purely technical decision. It is usually a billing one. Almost every site embedding OpenStreetMap could have embedded a commercial map instead and chose not to, which makes the Maps category less a question of cartography than of which site owners are willing to trade a turnkey service for one they assemble themselves.

The project is an open geographic database maintained by volunteers and published by the OpenStreetMap Foundation under ODbL, a share alike license carrying attribution and redistribution obligations. Websites almost never touch that database directly. What they load is a tile server plus a rendering library such as Leaflet or MapLibre, so a detection here is really a detection of that client side stack rather than of the data behind it.

As of October 2026 we identify the technology on 23,215 sites. The count is conservative in one direction and generous in another. Sites that proxy tiles through their own domain, or bundle a mapping component that hides its origin, will be missed entirely, while sites that merely load a mapping library and never show a map to most visitors are included. Treat the population as an approximation of the open mapping camp, not a precise membership list.

Contributions have been accumulating since 2004, long enough that coverage in dense urban areas is a genuine alternative rather than a fallback, and the migrations we observe reflect that maturity. Every commercial mapping provider that has repriced its API has pushed some portion of its customers toward open data. For a mapping vendor, this population is a churn list. For a tile hosting, geocoding or routing company, it is a warm one, because sites running open data still need somewhere to serve it from and someone to turn addresses into coordinates.

Checking a single domain tells you which library that one site happens to load. An export answers the commercial question instead: how many sites sit in this camp, where they are registered, what their domains suggest about sector, and which of them pair open mapping with the paid services that surround it. Attribution obligations under ODbL give the list a second use, for anyone auditing compliance across a portfolio of sites rather than one page at a time.