A study of desktop browsing behavior released on May 5, 2026 by Northeastern University reports that the average American spends more time on Gmail than on the bottom 300,000 websites combined, and that a single corporation, Alphabet, absorbs more than a third of all time spent on the desktop web.

The report, titled How Americans Spend Their Time Online, was produced by the Institute for Information, the Internet and Democracy at Northeastern University. Authors David Lazer, Burak Ozturan, Christo Wilson, David Choffnes, Cassidy Waldrip, Hsiu-Chi Lu and John Wihbey drew on data from the National Internet Observatory, a research infrastructure funded by the National Science Foundation. The dataset tracks desktop web browsing between June 2024 and December 2025 and captures a picture of concentration that maps directly onto the economics of digital advertising.

For marketers, the findings put hard behavioral numbers behind a structural condition the industry already treats as a given: attention, and therefore advertising inventory, flows through a handful of gatekeepers. PPC Land has documented the commercial version of this concentration repeatedly, but the Northeastern data measures the raw substrate underneath the ad market - where people actually direct their eyes.

A tiny slice of the web holds most of the attention

The single largest platform in the study is Gmail, which accounted for 16.4% of all user time. According to the report, the top 10 websites together captured nearly half of all browsing time, at 49.7%, and the top 100 absorbed close to 70%. The remaining 344,653 websites, representing more than 99.9% of the 344,753 unique sites observed, collectively accounted for just 31.5% of user attention.

The authors put the imbalance in blunt terms. The average person in the sample spent more time on Gmail alone than on the bottom 300,000 websites combined. As the report states, "a tiny number of websites capture the vast majority of where we spend our time online, while most of the web is rarely visited."

Below Gmail, the platform ranking runs through YouTube at 10.4%, Facebook at 8.0%, Google applications including Drive and Meet at 5.9%, Yahoo Mail at 3.7%, Microsoft Outlook at 2.9%, Google Search at 2.3%, Amazon at 1.9%, ChatGPT at 1.5%, Reddit at 1.5%, X at 1.3% and AOL Mail at 1.1%. Each figure carries a 95% confidence interval; Gmail's, for instance, runs from 14.7% to 18.4%.

Five companies, half the day

When the same browsing time is regrouped by corporate owner, the concentration sharpens. Alphabet, the parent of Google Search, YouTube, Gmail and Google Drive, accounted for 35.0% of all desktop browsing time - more than one third of observed activity. According to the report, Meta, covering Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, ranked a distant second at 8.9%. Microsoft followed at 5.1%, Yahoo at 4.3% and Amazon at 3.0%.

Those five companies together capture more than half of all time Americans spend on the desktop web. The remaining named corporations trail well behind: OpenAI at 1.5%, Reddit at 1.5%, X at 1.3%, AOL at 1.1% and Netflix at 0.8%. The Alphabet share alone carries a confidence interval of 32.2% to 38.3%, meaning even the low end of the estimate leaves the company controlling close to a third of the measured web.

This is the behavioral counterpart to a market structure PPC Land has tracked through successive earnings cycles. Alphabet's advertising revenue exceeded $87 billion in the first quarter of 2026, with Google Search and Other growing 19% to $60.4 billion. The Northeastern study helps explain why that revenue is so durable: the attention that ad dollars chase is anchored to properties one company owns. The report's conclusion draws the implication out directly, noting that concentration at this level shapes "who controls the infrastructure of online life, and how shifts in the policies or algorithms of a single company can reverberate across the broader information environment."

Email and social media eat the desktop day

Beyond which specific sites people visit, the researchers classified all 344,753 websites into functional categories based on primary use. Two categories dominate. Social Media accounted for 25.3% of desktop time and Email for 24.9%, together making up roughly half of all activity measured.

The rest of the day is spread thin. Productivity tools such as Google Docs and Drive ranked third at 13.0%, followed by Commerce at 8.9%, Streaming at 5.7%, Search at 4.3%, large language model tools at 2.9%, Gaming at 2.8% and News at 2.5%.

One methodological wrinkle affects how these rankings should be read. The authors classified YouTube as Social Media rather than Streaming. Had they placed it in Streaming instead, that category would jump to 16.1% and Social Media would fall to 14.9%, reversing their positions. The choice matters for anyone parsing category-level attention, because a single high-volume platform can swing an entire functional bucket.

The Search figure is worth isolating for the advertising trade. Search, as a standalone browsing category, absorbs only 4.3% of desktop time in this measurement - a fraction of the time poured into email and social feeds, yet the source of the largest single advertising revenue line in the industry. The gap between time spent and money spent underlines how efficiently search monetizes intent relative to the sheer hours logged elsewhere.

AI tools now outrank news

The finding likely to travel furthest concerns artificial intelligence. Large language model tools, including ChatGPT and Gemini, now account for 2.9% of total online time. News sites account for 2.5%. In this dataset, AI has already overtaken news as a browsing destination.

That crossover lands in the middle of a documented reshaping of how information reaches audiences. PPC Land has reported that Google Search referrals to news publishers fell from 51% to 27% between 2023 and the fourth quarter of 2025, and that AI Overviews correlate with a 58% reduction in click-through rates for top-ranking pages. The Northeastern numbers add a demand-side reading to that supply-side collapse: as news loses its distribution channels, the audience is not idle - it is spending measurable time inside AI tools instead.

The commercial stakes of that shift are already visible in ad tech. OpenAI began formally testing ads inside ChatGPT in February 2026, and by early May more than 1,000 brands were running campaigns through a single ad tech partner's connection. The report frames the emergence of these tools as "a rapid shift in online human behavior, one that warrants continued tracking as these tools evolve." A destination that did not register in browsing panels a few years ago now consumes more attention than the entire news web.

The web splits sharply by age

Age turns out to be one of the strongest predictors of how desktop time is spent. Gmail's share climbs steadily with age: 9% for users aged 18 to 29, 16% for 30 to 49, 19% for 50 to 64 and 20% for those 65 and older. Facebook shows a similar gradient, accounting for 14% of browsing time among users 65 and older but only 2% among those under 30. Yahoo Mail and AOL, effectively absent from younger users' activity, still command substantial attention among the oldest cohort.

Younger users tilt the other way. According to the report, users under 30 spend 13% of their time on YouTube, 9% on Google applications and 3% on ChatGPT, compared with 6%, 3% and less than 1% respectively among the oldest group. At the category level, adults 65 and older devoted 36.7% of their desktop time to email, against 11.6% for those aged 18 to 29. The oldest cohort also spent 4.6% of its time on news, versus 1.1% for the youngest. Younger users concentrated instead on productivity tools, at 21.3% for the 18 to 29 group versus 7.1% for those 65 and older, and on LLM platforms, at 5.1% versus 1.1%.

A counterintuitive detail sits underneath these shares. The percentages describe how each group allocates its time, not how much time it spends. The oldest cohort logs the most desktop hours overall, averaging 3.22 hours per day, compared with 1.79 hours for users aged 18 to 29. Younger users, the authors note, likely spend considerable additional time on mobile devices that this desktop dataset does not capture.

Methodology and its limits

The study rests on behavioral data collected through the National Internet Observatory, which recruits US residents to install a browser extension that records browsing activity and transmits it under a privacy-preserving access framework. Participation involves a consent process that requires potential participants to pass a quiz demonstrating knowledge of the data collection.

The full dataset comprised 53,243,995 website visits. From an initial 6,499 registered users, the researchers excluded 1,891 whose activity was confined to survey sites or who spent more than 90% of their time on a single site, leaving a final analytic sample of 4,608 users. To measure engagement, the team used visit focus, a metric that counts only the time a browser tab is actively in the foreground rather than merely loaded in the background. Because participants are recruited through non-probability methods, the data were weighted to approximate US adults who have internet access and use a device other than a mobile phone, a population representing roughly 85% of American adults. Estimates carry 95% confidence intervals calculated through bootstrapping with 500 iterations.

Several limitations narrow the scope of the conclusions. The dataset covers desktop browsing only, excluding mobile activity, work computers, browsing by minors and incognito sessions. It also excludes streaming on internet-connected televisions, which the authors note likely removes the bulk of time spent on services such as Netflix. Participants were instructed not to install the extension on work devices, so professional browsing falls outside the frame. The report also flags a likely over-representation of Bing, which offers reward incentives that disproportionately attract compensated panelists. The authors describe the estimates as best understood as reflecting personal, non-workplace desktop behavior rather than the totality of American internet use. A companion report on mobile time is planned.

Why the measurement matters for marketers

For the advertising and marketing community, the value of the study is not any single percentage but the independent confirmation of a structure that ad budgets already assume. The properties that hold attention are owned by the same companies that sell the inventory against it. Alphabet controls the largest share of both. PPC Land has reported that the top four demand-side platforms now control roughly 85% of global programmatic spend, and that in some national markets close to two in every three advertising pounds flow to Google, Meta and Amazon. The browsing data shows the audience-side mirror of those spending figures.

The emergence of LLM tools as a measurable destination, already ahead of news, signals where the next contest for attention is forming. As independent measurement of the sort the National Internet Observatory provides becomes rarer against platform-controlled data, studies grounded in observed behavior rather than self-report offer a check on how attention, and the money that follows it, actually moves through the web.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Researchers at the Institute for Information, the Internet and Democracy at Northeastern University - David Lazer, Burak Ozturan, Christo Wilson, David Choffnes, Cassidy Waldrip, Hsiu-Chi Lu and John Wihbey - using data from the National Internet Observatory.

What: A report finding that Alphabet accounts for 35.0% of US desktop browsing time, that the top 10 websites capture 49.7% of all time, that Gmail alone draws 16.4%, and that large language model tools now consume more attention (2.9%) than news (2.5%).

When: The report was published on May 5, 2026, drawing on browsing data collected between June 2024 and December 2025.

Where: The United States, measuring desktop browsing among a weighted sample of 4,608 adults.

Why: The study provides independent, behavior-based evidence of how concentrated online attention has become, mapping the audience-side foundation beneath a digital advertising market dominated by the same handful of companies that own the platforms where Americans spend their time.