How the grading works.
Every website is scored out of 100 points across four equally-weighted categories, 25 points each. The same criteria apply to every company, every year, so a grade means the same thing whether it’s 2005 or 2025.
Global Reach (Languages)
“The website supports enough languages to reach a wide global audience.”
Global Navigation
“Web users can quickly and easily find their localized content, regardless of what language they speak.”
Global/Mobile Architecture
“The website leverages global templates to support global branding while still allowing room for local customization.”
Localization & Social
“The website is relevant to the user's locale and culture and provides functionality on par with the global website.”
Global Reach (Languages)
The only purely quantitative category. Score runs from 0–25 as languages supported climbs from 0 to 50 — a website needs 50 or more languages, enough to reach upwards of 95% of internet users, to earn full marks. US and UK English are counted separately, since a growing number of sites now maintain both. Translation quality isn't measured, only whether a distinct, navigable version of the site exists in that language.
Global Navigation
Hand-reviewed for every site. A high score requires country-code domains (acme.de, acme.com.br), a permanent global gateway visible on every page — ideally in the page's upper right — with country and language names shown in their own language, and no single region favored over another. Geolocation and automatic language detection earn extra credit, but only on top of a working gateway, not as a replacement for one.
Global/Mobile Architecture
Hand-reviewed, with one hard number folded in: mobile homepage weight. Sites averaging under 3MB get a small score boost; sites over 10MB take a penalty. The rest of the score reflects whether local sites share a consistent design template — efficient to maintain, credible to visitors — while still leaving room for local content, and whether the mobile experience holds up on its own rather than just shrinking the desktop layout.
Localization & Social
Hand-reviewed. Translating a homepage and calling it done — a “local façade” — scores lower than a smaller site that sets honest expectations and delivers on them. Reviewers look at whether images, currencies, units, and measurements are actually localized (not just text), and whether the site connects users to local social communities in their own language.
Quantitative vs. subjective
Only Global Reach is purely quantitative. The other three categories are judgment calls, informed by more than two decades of hands-on research — nothing here is outsourced or automated. Every one of the 150 benchmarked websites is reviewed individually each year: languages checked, navigation tested across browsers and devices, and a minimum of two or three country sites reviewed from the point of view of a local visitor.
What the scores mean
| Score | Grade |
|---|---|
| 90–100 | A |
| 80–90 | B |
| 70–80 | C |
| 60–70 | D |
| < 60 | F |