Website Fonts Study

Key takeaways

1. Of 566 working homepages among the 1,000 most-visited domains, Inter is the most common body font (51 homepages), then Roboto (37), Open Sans (28), Apple's system font (24) and Arial (23). See details
2. No font dominates: the homepages use 209 different first-choice body fonts, and the top five together cover only 29%. See details
3. 40% set their text in their own or a licensed brand font, as Amazon Web Services, Cloudflare, Binance, NVIDIA and Anthropic do; 36% use an open-source library font such as Inter or Roboto. See details
4. Serif body text is rare: 5 homepages (1%). 66% of homepages use the same font for their main heading as for body text. See details
5. The median homepage downloads 1 web font; 80 (14%) download none and rely on fonts already on the device. See details
6. 5 homepages set no font at all and show text in the browser's default, Times. See details

What fonts do top websites use?

Inter, more than any other. We opened the homepage of each of the 1,000 most-visited domains on the Tranco list and read the font the body text asks for first. Inter led, on 51 of the 556 homepages whose body font we could read, followed by Roboto (37), Open Sans (28), Apple's system font (24) and Arial (23). Even so, no font dominates: those 556 homepages ask for 209 different body fonts, and the top five cover 29%.

Do big websites use their own fonts?

More of them than any other kind, though not most. 227 homepages (40%) set body text in their own or a licensed brand font: Amazon Web Services (Amazon Ember), Cloudflare (STK Bureau Sans), Binance (BinanceNova), NVIDIA (NVIDIA-NALA) and Anthropic (Anthropic Sans) among them. 203 (36%) use a free, open-source library font such as Inter, Roboto or Open Sans; 62 (11%) use a standard font already on most computers, such as Arial or Helvetica; and 59 (10%) ask for the device's own interface font. 5 set no font at all, so text appears in the browser's default, Times. On 10 we couldn't read the body font: the longest paragraph was a cookie notice, an icon font or text with no font set on a page that otherwise uses web fonts.

Do websites use a different font for headings?

Usually not. Of the 484 homepages with a main heading we could measure, 321 (66%) use the same font for the heading as for body text. The rest pair two different fonts.

Do websites use serif fonts?

Hardly ever for body text: 5 of the 556 homepages we could read (1%) chose a serif for their body text, among them the BBC (BBC Reith Serif) and NPR. The homepage of a big website in 2026 is a sans-serif page.

How many web fonts does a homepage load?

A median of 1 font family, not counting icon fonts. 80 homepages (14%) load none and use fonts already on the device. 76% of the homepages we could read render their body text in a font they download. The most-downloaded families are Inter, Roboto, Open Sans, Google Sans and Poppins.

What this means for your website

• A good free font is in good company. Inter and Roboto are the two most common body fonts on the biggest sites.
• A brand font is a big-site habit, not a requirement. 40% of the top sites have one; the rest use a library or system font.
• Keep body text sans-serif and simple. Only 5 of the 556 top homepages we could read chose a serif.
• Load few fonts. The median top homepage downloads 1 font family.

Mark Studios designs brand identities and builds websites, including the typography.

How we ran the study

Sites. The 579 working homepages found among the 1,000 highest-ranked domains on the Tranco list ZJ8PG in our homepage video study, a list built for research (Le Pochat et al., NDSS 2019). On this visit 13 failed to load, answered with a bot check or had no readable text, leaving 566.

Crawl. On October 29, 2026 we opened each homepage in headless Chromium driven by Playwright at a desktop size of 1366 x 900, waited for its fonts to finish loading, and read the computed font-family of the longest visible paragraph (the body text) and of the first visible H1, plus every font the page had loaded. A page's "first choice" is the first name in its font stack; names are normalised (case, quotes, suffixes such as "Variable"), copies of one family under other names ("proxima-nova", "ProximaNova", "__Inter_da1787") count once, faces that only supply emoji, flags or currency signs are skipped, and icon fonts are left out. On 10 homepages the longest paragraph was a cookie or consent notice, an icon font or text with no font set on a page that otherwise uses web fonts; their body font counts as not measured, and body-font shares use the other 556.

Checking the reading. For a random 25 homepages we asked Chrome itself which font painted the measured paragraph (DevTools CSS.getPlatformFontsForNode): on all 18 where Chrome reported a readable font name, it was the first choice we recorded. For the other 7 it returned no name or an unreadable one, as it can for downloaded fonts. None of the sites or type foundries reviewed or endorsed this study.

Part of a series. The same top-1,000 domains feed six studies, each from its own visit: homepage video, social media links, homepage SEO, third-party tools, AI crawlers in robots.txt and fonts.

Limitations

• First choice, not always the font you see. If a site's first font fails to load, the browser falls back to the next one in the stack.
• System fonts depend on the device. "system-ui" is San Francisco on a Mac and Segoe UI on Windows.
• One paragraph and one heading per page. Other parts of a page can use other fonts.
• Domains, not companies. One company can appear several times.

How to cite this study

Link to the section you use, for example https://www.markstudios.com/research/website-fonts-study#top-fonts. To cite the study as a whole:

Mark Studios. "Website Fonts Study." Published Oct 29, 2026. https://www.markstudios.com/research/website-fonts-study

@misc{markstudios_website_fonts_study_2026,
  author = {{Mark Studios}},
  title = {{Website Fonts Study}},
  year = {2026},
  month = oct,
  url = {https://www.markstudios.com/research/website-fonts-study},
  note = {Last verified 2026-10-29}
}

Our measurements and the CSV are free to reuse under CC BY 4.0 with a link to this page.

Sources

Download the per-site results (CSV)

Widely quoted video statistics on other topics are traced to their origin, with a verdict on each, in our research fact-check.

1. Tranco, Tranco list ZJ8PG (generated October 28, 2026; ranks aggregated from Chrome UX Report, Farsight, Majestic, Cloudflare Radar and Cisco Umbrella, September 29 to October 28, 2026). Accessed 2026-10-29.
2. NDSS Symposium, Le Pochat et al., Tranco: A Research-Oriented Top Sites Ranking Hardened Against Manipulation (NDSS 2019). Accessed 2026-10-29.
3. Chrome DevTools Protocol, CSS.getPlatformFontsForNode. Accessed 2026-10-29.
4. Microsoft, Playwright browser automation. Accessed 2026-10-29.

Update policy and change log

We plan to rerun the crawl every six months with the homepage video study. Corrections go to contact@markstudios.com.

• Oct 29, 2026: First published: 573 homepages among the 1,000 most-visited domains.
• Oct 29, 2026, corrected the same evening: 7 bot-check pages (IMDb, SlideShare and five Amazon sites) taken out, leaving 566; one family under several names now counts once (209 body fonts, not 256), and open-source fonts filed as brand fonts moved; 10 body readings that caught a cookie notice, an icon font or unstyled text are set aside, so 5, not 12, show the browser's default; serif body text is 5, not 19, because the default-Times readings had counted as serif.