We studied the design of 10,000 websites. Here's what we found

to investigate ... notion that websites are starting to look the same ... data mining ... scrutinized nearly 200,000 images across 10,000 websites... of the Russell 1000, the top U.S. businesses by market capitalization ... Alexa’s 500 most trafficked sites... sites nominated for Webby Awards ... how many pixel-by-pixel edits ... to transform color scheme or page structure of one website into another ... trained a machine learning model ...

color, layout, and AI-generated attributes... differences between websites peaked between 2008 and 2010 and then decreased between 2010 and 2016 ... Layout differences decreased the most ... code similarity ... significantly decreased ... use of software libraries has increased a lot... Sites built with ... Bootstrap, FontAwesome, and JQuery UI tended to look much more similar ...

adhering to trends ... likely becoming more accessible ... libraries better at conforming to accessibility standards ... more user-friendly... visitors won’t have to spend as much time learning ... [but] web design may lose much of its power as a form of creative expression... large tech companies who maintain those libraries... disproportionate power ... big tech companies’ design principles are not necessarily right for every site... part of a larger story of consolidation in the tech industry