Tony Wang4 min readThe Chrome Web Store Graveyard: 91.5% of Extensions Have Under 1,000 Users
We measured all 314,807 Chrome Web Store listings: 288,044 have under 1,000 users and 67,934 have none at all. Just 1,776 clear 100,000 installs.
The Chrome Web Store looks vast. We pulled every active listing — 314,807 of them — and measured the one thing that actually indicates whether a listing has an audience: Google's displayed install count. The number of listings is not the story. The distribution is. Almost none of the store has users.
The corpus is Crawlora's Chrome Web Store dataset (chrome_extensions_v1), a single snapshot crawled in July 2026. It breaks down into 225,864 extensions, 75,170 themes, and 13,414 legacy apps. "Users" throughout this piece means the install count Google shows on the listing page, which Google reports in coarse buckets (for example, 10,000+), so we group by those buckets rather than treating any figure as exact.
The distribution
Sort all 314,807 listings into the six user bands Google's counts allow, and the shape is immediate. One band dominates, and it is the band closest to zero.
The two lowest bands carry the store. Adding the 74,395 listings with no displayed users to the 213,648 with 1 to 999 gives 288,044 listings under 1,000 users — 91.5% of everything in the store. The distribution does not taper. It collapses.
The truly dead
A listing with few users might still be new, or niche, or waiting. A listing with no users and no reviews is a different thing: nobody has installed it and nobody has said anything about it.
Reviews tell the same story a second way. 178,115 listings (56.6%) are unrated, meaning they have never collected a single review. Only 136,692 (43.4%) have any reviews at all. On both signals we can measure — installs and reviews — the majority of the store registers nothing.
The 0.56% that matter
Against that backdrop, the listings with a real audience are rare enough to count precisely. Only 1,776 listings (0.56%) have 100,000 or more users. Only 286 listings (0.09%) have 1,000,000 or more.
| Displayed users | Listings | Share of store |
|---|---|---|
| Under 1,000 | 288,044 | 91.5% |
| No displayed users | 74,395 | 23.6% |
| Zero users and zero reviews | 67,934 | 21.6% |
| Unrated (zero reviews) | 178,115 | 56.6% |
| 100,000+ | 1,776 | 0.56% |
| 1,000,000+ | 286 | 0.09% |
Attention on the Chrome Web Store is not spread thin. It is concentrated into a sliver. The 1,776 listings above 100,000 users are what people actually run; the other 313,031 are, to varying degrees, catalog filler. This is the same pattern we found reading the mobile stores in The AI App Graveyard 2026 — a different store, the same brutally top-heavy shape.
What it means
For a developer weighing whether to build an extension, the base rate matters more than any success story. 91.5% of listings sit under 1,000 users, and 0.56% clear 100,000. Shipping into the store does not distribute a listing; the median outcome is closer to the 67,934 inert listings than to the 286 with a million users.
For anyone researching the extension ecosystem, the lesson is to segment by adoption before drawing conclusions. Treating all 314,807 listings as one population blends a handful of widely-installed tools with a tail of listings that no one has ever used, and any average computed across that mixture describes neither group. In Crawlora's Chrome Web Store dataset you can filter by min_users to isolate the listings that actually have an audience and study them separately from the graveyard.
Query the Chrome Web Store as a dataset
Search 314,807 extensions, themes and apps by adoption, rating, permission and category, and segment the market by real install count. REST and MCP, 2,000 free credits a month, no card.