Download websites that use Ruby on Rails

About Ruby on Rails

Nothing about a backend framework is meant to be visible from outside. A browser receives HTML, and whether that HTML was assembled by Ruby on Rails, by a PHP application or by a static site generator is deliberately none of its business. Everything recorded on this page is inference, and saying so belongs before any number rather than after it.

The inference comes from residue. Session cookie names, the fingerprint of the asset pipeline in stylesheet and script URLs, characteristic error pages, header values a default installation emits that a deployment never bothered to remove. Sites that strip those, or that sit behind a cache serving prerendered pages, fall out of the count entirely. The published population is a lower bound and skews toward installations nobody hardened.

With the caveat stated, the signal is among the more commercially loaded in our data. Rails was released in 2004 under an MIT licence and has always been the framework of the product company rather than the brochure site. Nobody installs it to publish a restaurant menu. A domain running it has, or at some point had, engineers on payroll, a database behind the pages and something closer to an application than a website.

As of September 2026 we can attribute 440,524 sites to it, with 265,419 in United States and a heavy weighting toward .com. American concentration reflects where the venture funded software industry sits, not where Ruby itself was created. Outside that block the framework thins out fast, which is useful in its own right, because in a smaller market a Rails domain is unusual enough to work as a qualifying signal by itself.

The questions the list actually answers are hiring, selling and risk. Recruiters and development agencies want the companies running the stack they staff for. Developer tool vendors want teams already committed to a server rendered application framework rather than a static host or a page builder. Security researchers want the exposed surface the day a framework advisory lands, and that work cannot be done one domain at a time, because the exercise is to enumerate everything affected before somebody else does. Analysts want direction of travel for a framework that has been shipping since 2004 and is neither new nor finished, a trajectory that only shows up in the aggregate.