What we measured
For each of the largest website platforms in our 1.1 million-site US corpus, we measured the typical number of referring domains its sites have, meaning how many other websites link to them, using the Common Crawl webgraph. Typical here is the geometric mean across sites present in the link graph, which keeps one giant site from skewing the whole platform. Then we sorted the platforms from most-linked to least.
The leaderboard
Here is the ranking. The enterprise content platforms sit far above the mass-market builders. If you stopped here, you would conclude that Brightspot and Arc XP build stronger websites than Wix and Squarespace. That conclusion would be wrong.
The five platforms at the top have fewer than 1,100 sites each. The five at the bottom have tens of thousands. The ranking is sorting by who buys the platform, not by what the platform does.
Typical referring domains = geometric mean over sites in the link graph. Source: Stackra corpus via Common Crawl webgraph, 2026.
| Platform | Typical referring domains | Sites | Typical customer |
|---|---|---|---|
| Brightspot (enterprise CMS) | 556 | 335 | Large publishers |
| Arc XP (enterprise CMS) | 316 | 277 | National newsrooms |
| Sitecore (enterprise DXP) | 267 | 1,029 | Enterprises |
| TownNews (news platform) | 235 | 864 | Local news outlets |
| Salesforce Commerce | 222 | 357 | Large retailers |
| WordPress | 14 | 458,646 | Everyone |
| Shopify | 11 | 66,921 | Online stores |
| Squarespace | 10 | 86,847 | Small businesses |
| Wix | 6 | 95,927 | Small businesses |
| GoDaddy Website Builder | 4 | 21,563 | New small businesses |
Source: Stackra corpus, 1.1 million US business sites, via Common Crawl webgraph, 2026.
Why the ranking is really a customer sort
Enterprise content platforms like Brightspot, Arc XP, and Sitecore are sold through a sales team to newsrooms, national brands, and large institutions. Those organizations already had thousands of inbound links before they ever chose a platform. The mass-market builders, Wix, Squarespace, and GoDaddy, are self-serve tools a brand-new small business signs up for on day one, with no links yet. The platform did not create the authority gap. The gap was there first, and it decided which businesses could afford which platform.
What to do with this
Never benchmark your own site against a platform's average. A Wix bakery is not underperforming because enterprise CMS sites have more referring domains. They are not in the same league, and the league was set at signup. The only fair authority comparison is against businesses like yours: same industry, same rough size. That is the comparison worth making.