Amazon retired Alexa Internet’s domain-ranking service in 2022; it was separate from the Alexa voice assistant. The shutdown removed a familiar public popularity signal that some cybersecurity teams used to help distinguish likely legitimate domains from threats and reduce false positives. No single replacement list is a drop-in equivalent: its usefulness depends on how and where its data was collected and whether that traffic resembles the environment being protected.
What happened to Alexa rankings?
Alexa Internet published domain popularity rankings for more than 25 years. A 2024 Internet Measurement Conference paper reports that the service announced its retirement on December 8, 2021, and that its Top 1 Million list was scheduled to end on May 1, 2022. The paper says the web portal retired on May 1, while the CSV endpoint continued to update until 2023. Akamai also dates the announcement to December 2021 and the permanent retirement to May 2022. The 2024 paper and Akamai’s account document the timeline.
This was the web analytics and domain-ranking service, not Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant. The cited sources establish when the service closed, but do not establish Amazon’s reason for doing so.
Why did a popularity ranking matter to cybersecurity?
Popularity can be one clue that a domain is legitimate. Akamai’s researchers say they used Alexa data to identify popular domains and make better decisions about removing false positives from blocklists. A mistaken block can disrupt access for customers, employees, or internet subscribers, so a popularity signal can help inform review.
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It is not proof that a domain is safe. Akamai describes checking popularity alongside other allowlisting controls and validating artifacts using both malicious and legitimate signals. Popularity should inform a security decision, not decide it on its own.
The data source also shapes what a list sees. Akamai notes that a worldwide ranking may not reflect a particular country’s popular domains, and that rankings built mainly from HTTP transactions may miss domains used for DNS services. Its researchers developed internal rankings to account for regional and network differences. Infoblox, for its part, says it stopped using Alexa years earlier after finding statistical issues that made the lists unreliable for its use cases; that is Infoblox’s experience, not evidence that the list was unsuitable for every organization.
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- Your favorite music and content – Play music, audiobooks, and podcasts from Amazon Music, Apple Music, Spotify and others or via Bluetooth throughout your home.
- Alexa is happy to help – Ask Alexa for weather updates and to set hands-free timers, get answers to your questions and even hear jokes. Need a few extra minutes in the morning? Just tap your Echo Dot to snooze your alarm.
- Keep your home comfortable – Control compatible smart home devices with your voice and routines triggered by built-in motion or indoor temperature sensors. Create routines to automatically turn on lights when you walk into a room, or start a fan if the inside temperature goes above your comfort zone.
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What replaced the Alexa Top 1 Million list?
There is no established universal successor. Infoblox discusses Cisco Umbrella, Majestic, and the aggregate Tranco list alongside its own InfoRanks and rankings from selected networks. Akamai describes AkaRank, which combines its data with anonymized DNS and partner traffic to develop regional popularity views. These are examples of different approaches, not a verified current comparison of availability or terms. Infoblox says it reports InfoRanks to customers through its service portal.
Different lists can represent different users, regions, networks, collection methods, and domain types. A public list may be useful context, but it should not be assumed to match the users or DNS activity a security team needs to assess.
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- Your favorite music and content – Play music, audiobooks, and podcasts from Amazon Music, Apple Music, Spotify and others or via Bluetooth throughout your home.
- Alexa is happy to help – Ask Alexa for weather updates and to set hands-free timers, get answers to your questions and even hear jokes. Need a few extra minutes in the morning? Just tap your Echo Dot to snooze your alarm.
- Keep your home comfortable – Control compatible smart home devices with your voice and routines triggered by built-in motion or indoor temperature sensors. Create routines to automatically turn on lights when you walk into a room, or start a fan if the inside temperature goes above your comfort zone.
- Do more with device pairing – Fill your home with music using compatible Echo devices in different rooms, or create a home theatre system with Fire TV.
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What Infoblox’s 2022 comparison found—and what it does not prove
In a June 22, 2022 analysis, Infoblox compared public top-one-million lists with a random subset of its active high-threat second-level domains from its Threat Intelligence Data Exchange. The analysis considered approximately 1.6 million domains and reported how many appeared in each list. These are dated findings from Infoblox’s data and method, not a timeless quality score or an independent industry-wide ranking.
| Public list | Infoblox active high-threat domains present | Overlap with Infoblox DNS forwarding proxy top one million | Overlap with Infoblox BloxOne client top one million |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tranco | 6,354 | 34% | 45% |
| Majestic | 4,757 | 26% | 35% |
| Alexa | 2,118 | 24% | 35% |
| Cisco Umbrella | 1,970 | 19% | 27% |
Infoblox concluded that the public lists had little overlap with its own network views, illustrating that rankings can be network-specific. Its analysis also cautions against assuming that simply combining lists makes the result more useful or easier to interpret. The figures are from Infoblox’s June 22, 2022 article, “Best Domain Ranking Source in Light of Alexa Ranking End.”
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How should a security team choose a replacement?
Start with the security decision the ranking is meant to support, then check whether the list’s evidence fits the protected users and traffic. Infoblox recommends using rankings relevant to the organization’s own environment, ideally derived from its own network or similar traffic; it says public lists should inform rather than dictate workflow decisions.
- Data provenance: Find out whether the ranking draws on browser or HTTP observations, DNS observations, or a blend. These approaches can surface different domains.
- Network and geographic fit: Ask whether the data represents the relevant country, ISP, enterprise, or customer base rather than assuming a global list will match.
- Entity coverage: Check whether the list ranks second-level domains, hostnames, or DNS infrastructure, and whether that matches the entities involved in your workflow.
- Stability and uncertainty: Consider how ranks change and whether a single position hides uncertainty. Infoblox describes its InfoRanks as providing a likely rank and an interval.
- Decision role: Treat popularity as supporting context alongside threat intelligence and other controls, especially when a false positive could block legitimate access.
As Infoblox put it in its June 2022 article: “For most security use cases, the best list of top domains is one generated from your own network traffic, or one containing similar traffic to your own.”
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What the shutdown means for security teams
Alexa’s retirement removed a widely known public ranking, not the value of popularity data as one contextual signal. Teams evaluating alternatives should select evidence that resembles their users and network, understand what the list measures, and keep it subordinate to a broader security review. The available evidence does not establish one definitive successor or a current, universal ranking of the alternatives.
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