If the internet feels like the same fifteen websites over and over, that impression can be measured.
One simple experiment is to count how many distinct domains a person actually visits during a month.
Browsers already keep enough local history to make that possible. Firefox, for example, stores browsing history as part of a user’s profile data and can preserve it through backup and sync features. See Mozilla’s current documentation on Firefox browsing data and backups.
The interesting part is not extracting the data.
It is deciding what to count.
Define the unit before counting it
Does news.example.com count separately from example.com?
What about docs.example.com and shop.example.com?
A reasonable approach is to reduce URLs to their registrable domain, so multiple pages and subdomains belonging to the same site count once. The exact rule should be documented because different definitions can produce very different totals.
Then define a visit.
A page that opened automatically in the background should probably not count the same way as a page the user actively selected. Redirects, authentication domains, CDNs, payment processors, embedded trackers, and browser-internal pages can inflate the number without representing meaningful destinations.
A privacy-conscious analysis can stay entirely local. The browser history never needs to leave the machine. A script can extract only the hostname and date, discard full URLs and query strings, reduce hosts to domains, calculate totals, then delete the working copy.
One number is useful but incomplete
Suppose a person encountered 312 distinct domains in one month.
That sounds diverse until you learn that 80 percent of their page visits happened on five of them.
Or perhaps they visited only 90 domains but spent substantial time reading dozens of independent sites.
Useful companion measures include:
- total distinct domains;
- visits per domain;
- percentage of activity concentrated in the top 5 or top 10;
- number of domains visited only once;
- how many were reached directly, from search, or through social links;
- how many were independent sites versus major platforms.
Even then, the numbers do not measure quality.
Ten excellent specialist sites may be better than 1,000 random junk domains.
The value of the exercise is narrower.
Dead Internet Theory often describes a subjective sensation: the web seems smaller, more repetitive, more centralized.
Browsing history can turn part of that sensation into a testable question.
Maybe the web became smaller.
Maybe your route through it did.