github.com — Traffic, Worth & Safety

Tom Preston-Werner, Chris Wanstrath, PJ Hyett, and Scott Chacon founded GitHub in 2008. Microsoft acquired it in 2018 for $7.5 billion. It's where the world's software gets built — over 100 million developers use it, hosting more than 420 million repositories. If you've used any software in the last decade, some part of it almost certainly lived on GitHub at some point.

Based on our analysis, github.com implements HTTPS encryption and scores 60% on security headers. This is a reasonable security posture.

github.com implements 3 of 5 key security headers. Missing: Content-Security-Policy, X-XSS-Protection. Adding these would protect visitors from clickjacking, XSS, and MIME-type attacks.

GitHub enforces HTTPS with HSTS and offers comprehensive security features including Dependabot for automated vulnerability scanning, secret scanning to catch accidentally committed credentials, and code scanning powered by CodeQL. They require two-factor authentication for all active developers as of 2024. Their bug bounty program has paid out millions through HackerOne.

All values are estimates based on publicly available traffic data.

Ranking in the top 100 globally, github.com is one of the most visited websites on the internet — in the same tier as major platforms and search engines.

At this traffic level, github.com has significant monetization potential. Sites with similar traffic profiles typically earn through advertising, subscriptions, or e-commerce — not just display ads.

GitHub is the undisputed leader in code hosting, dwarfing GitLab and Bitbucket in both users and repositories. GitHub Copilot, their AI pair programming tool built on OpenAI's models, has become the most widely adopted AI coding assistant with over 1.8 million paying subscribers. It's transformed GitHub from a code hosting platform into an AI-powered development ecosystem.

These are the websites closest to github.com in global traffic ranking.

GitHub's mascot, the Octocat, was originally a stock illustration that co-founder Tom Preston-Werner found on iStockPhoto. The Arctic Code Vault project preserved 21TB of open-source code in a decommissioned coal mine in Svalbard, Norway, designed to last 1,000 years.