Download websites that use Outbrain

About Outbrain

A recommendation widget at the foot of an article is a business model made visible. Outbrain is placed there by publishers who need the page to earn something after the reader has finished reading, and each installation is a quiet statement that the site sells attention rather than products.

Sites that install it share a shape. They publish frequently, they draw traffic from search and social feeds rather than from a customer list, and their revenue depends on volume, which is why a unit that fills the space below the article is worth the tradeoff of sending readers somewhere else. The profile leans heavily toward news, recipe, health and entertainment publishers, and small independent sites appear alongside large media brands because the same tag is available to both.

Outbrain has been in this market since 2006, long enough that the widget has become part of what an advertising funded page simply looks like. Native advertising sits in an awkward position between editorial and sales, and browser tracking limits, consent requirements and reader hostility have been reshaping it for years. Every domain in the list belongs to a publisher that has weighed that tradeoff and currently comes down on the side of keeping the unit in place.

Detection is straightforward in principle, because the widget is JavaScript loaded from the vendor's own domain and visible in the page source. In practice it is messier than that. Tags are often injected by a consent manager only after the reader agrees, or loaded lazily once the reader scrolls, and a crawler that renders a page once without consenting to anything may never see them. As of October 2026 we record 18,251 sites carrying the tag, which is a lower bound on the publisher base rather than a complete roster of it.

The commercial question this list answers is about supply rather than demand. Competing recommendation and advertising networks want the roster of publishers a rival has signed, because those publishers are the addressable market for a switch or an addition. Advertisers and media agencies want to know where their placements are able to appear. Brand safety and research teams want inventory mapped against site categories and against whatever else the page loads. A Proprietary network publishes none of that, so the roster has to be observed from the outside, one page at a time.