How many Chrome extensions are there? October 2026 data

How many Chrome extensions are there? On October 22, 2026, the Chrome Web Store sitemap listed 383,061 items. Not all of them are extensions. From a random sample of 4,000 of those listings, we estimate the store holds about 282,000 extensions, 81,000 themes and 17,000 legacy Chrome Apps. The most surprising number is not the total but its age: half of today's extensions were first published in 2026.

Google does not publish an official count, and the figures most articles quote are two to six years old. This post gives a fresh count, explains how we got it so you can repeat it, and breaks the number down by type, category, publish date, Manifest version and update activity. If you build or market an extension, these numbers describe the market you are competing in.

Key takeaways

• The Chrome Web Store sitemap listed 383,061 items on October 22, 2026, and 99.4% of the sampled ones were live listings.
• About 282,000 of them are extensions (plus or minus 5,000), 81,000 are themes and 17,000 are old Chrome Apps.
• Half of all live extensions were first published in 2026. New extensions arrived at about 5,000 a month in 2025 and about 17,000 a month in the third quarter of 2026.
• Every extension in the sample uses Manifest V3, which matches Google's removal of the last Manifest V2 extensions on August 31, 2026.
• Only 32% of extensions were updated in the last 90 days, and 31% of the ones published before 2026 have not been updated in two years.

How many Chrome extensions are there in 2026?#

Here is the October 2026 picture in one table. The sitemap total is an exact count. The split by type comes from the random sample, so each estimate carries a margin of error at 95% confidence.

Three things stand out.

Themes and apps inflate the headline number. About a quarter of the store is not extensions at all. Themes only change the browser's colors and background images, and Chrome Apps are a platform Google has been winding down for years. When someone quotes "over 380,000 Chrome extensions", they are counting both.

The sitemap is close to complete. Of the 4,000 sampled URLs, 3,974 opened a normal listing page. The other 26 redirected to the store home page, which is what happens when a listing has been taken down. So the sitemap trails removals slightly, but by less than 1%.

The count has more than doubled since the last public estimates. DebugBear counted 137,345 extensions and 39,263 themes in 2020 and 111,933 extensions in 2024, while noting that its 2024 method missed extensions that do not appear in category listings. Part of the gap is method. Most of it, as the next section shows, is a 2026 publishing boom.

Half of all Chrome extensions were published in 2026#

Every listing page includes, in its page data, the date the item was first published. Grouping the sampled extensions by that date gives a clear result:

The monthly rate tells the same story. New extensions that are still listed today arrived at about 5,000 a month in 2025. In 2026 the rate rose every quarter: about 10,000 a month in the first quarter, 15,000 in the second and 17,000 in the third, with September alone at about 18,000.

Two caveats keep this honest. First, these are surviving listings. Extensions that were published in 2023 and removed in 2024 are not in today's sitemap, so older years are undercounted by design. Second, the listing data does not say why the rate jumped. The timing coincides with AI coding assistants that can produce a working Manifest V3 extension in an afternoon, and the new listings lean toward generic utilities: 44% of the extensions first published in 2026 sit in the Productivity "Tools" category, against 33% of older ones. That is consistent with a wave of quickly built tools, but it is an interpretation, not something the data proves.

For anyone launching an extension, the practical meaning is simple: the store is getting crowded faster than ever, and most of the new arrivals compete in the same few categories. Our Chrome extension usage statistics show what that does to user counts: the median extension published in 2026 has 7 users.

Chrome extensions by category#

The Chrome Web Store groups extensions into three top-level categories with subcategories under each. Productivity dominates:

In total, Productivity holds 72.9% of extensions, Lifestyle 17.8% and Make Chrome Yours 9.4%. Tools and Workflow & Planning together hold more than half of the store, so a new extension in those two subcategories competes with about 158,000 others. Smaller subcategories such as Travel, Household, and News & Weather each hold under 1%.

If you are still choosing what to build, category crowding is only half the picture. Our guide to finding and validating Chrome extension ideas with store data shows how to weigh it against demand.

Every Chrome extension now uses Manifest V3#

All 2,947 extensions in the sample declare "manifest_version": 3. That is what Google's own timeline says should be true: Chrome 138 disabled Manifest V2 extensions for all users in July 2025, and on August 31, 2026, all remaining Manifest V2 extensions were removed from the Chrome Web Store.

Two parts of the store did not move:

• Themes. 183 of the 848 sampled themes still declare Manifest V2. Themes contain no code, and the removal applied to extensions.
• Chrome Apps. All 179 sampled Chrome Apps declare Manifest V2. They are still listed, but they are a separate, legacy platform.

The removal also explains part of the churn in the store's oldest extensions: listings that never migrated are gone, and the ones that remain from before 2020 are mostly long-running, maintained products. We cover what else changed in the store this year in Chrome Web Store changes in 2026.

How many Chrome extensions are still maintained?#

The "Updated" date on each listing shows when the last version was published. Across all sampled extensions:

Because so many listings are new, the overall figures flatter the store. Looking only at extensions first published before 2026 gives a more sober picture: 24.4% of them received an update in 2026, 30.8% were never updated after their first release, and 31.1% have not changed in more than two years.

An extension that has not been updated in two years still works if its APIs have not changed, so an old date is not a defect by itself. But it is a signal worth tracking for your own listing and for competitors. Users read it as a sign of neglect, and a competitor that stops shipping is an opening. Our guide to Chrome extension version history shows how to record every release, since the store itself only shows the current version.

Languages: most listings are English only#

The sitemap also lists the languages each item's listing is available in. Across all 383,061 items:

• 86.7% of listings are available in a single language.
• 70.4% are English only, and 83.7% include English.
• 16.3% have no English listing at all. The most common other languages are Chinese, Japanese, Spanish and French.
• 6.3% are localized into ten or more languages.

Localized listings are rare enough that translating your store listing is still a way to stand out in non-English searches.

How we counted: methodology you can repeat#

The count has two steps: an exact total from the sitemap and an estimated split from a random sample.

1. Count the sitemap. The store's robots.txt points to https://chromewebstore.google.com/sitemap, a sitemap index with 45 shards. Each shard lists about 8,500 item URLs, and every URL ends in the item's 32-letter ID. Counting unique IDs across all shards gave 383,061 on October 22, 2026. This Node.js script does the same:

// count-cws.mjs: count the items listed in the Chrome Web Store sitemap (Node.js 18+).
const INDEX = 'https://chromewebstore.google.com/sitemap';
const sleep = (ms) => new Promise((resolve) => setTimeout(resolve, ms));

async function fetchXml(url, closingTag) {
  for (let attempt = 1; attempt <= 5; attempt++) {
    const body = await fetch(url, {
      headers: { 'User-Agent': 'store-census/1.0' },
      signal: AbortSignal.timeout(300_000), // generating a shard can take minutes
    })
      .then((res) => (res.ok ? res.text() : ''))
      .catch(() => '');
    if (body.includes(closingTag)) return body; // a 502 page or a cut-off body has no closing tag
    await sleep(attempt * 10_000);
  }
  throw new Error(`Gave up on ${url}`);
}

const index = await fetchXml(INDEX, '</sitemapindex>');
const shards = [...index.matchAll(/<loc>([^<]+)<\/loc>/g)].map((m) => m[1].replaceAll('&amp;', '&'));
const limit = Number(process.env.SHARDS ?? shards.length);

const ids = new Set();
for (const shard of shards.slice(0, limit)) {
  const xml = await fetchXml(shard, '</urlset>'); // one shard at a time: each takes about a minute
  for (const [, id] of xml.matchAll(/<loc>https:\/\/chromewebstore\.google\.com\/detail\/[^<]*\/([a-p]{32})<\/loc>/g)) {
    ids.add(id);
  }
  console.log(`${shard}: ${ids.size} items so far`);
}
console.log(`${shards.length} shards, ${ids.size} unique items in the first ${limit}`);

Expect it to be slow. Each shard took about a minute to generate when we counted, requesting several at once returned 502 errors, and later the same day even the index answered with a 502 after four minutes. That is why the script fetches one shard at a time, waits up to five minutes per request and retries with a growing pause. If it gives up, run it again later. Set SHARDS=2 for a quick test.

2. Sample the listings. We drew 4,000 IDs at random from the full list and opened each public listing page once, at four requests at a time. Each page includes the item's type, category, user count, rating, first-published date, last-updated date and manifest. The counts in this post are the sample shares multiplied by 383,061. With 4,000 samples, the margin of error is at most about 2 percentage points for any share quoted here.

What this method cannot see: unlisted and private extensions (they are not in the sitemap), extensions available only to enterprise domains, and extensions that were published and removed before October 2026. If you need numbers for individual extensions rather than the whole store, our guide to the Chrome Web Store stats API covers what each listing exposes and how to collect it responsibly.

What the count means for extension developers#

A store that gains 17,000 extensions a month changes how you should measure your own extension:

• Rank and visibility drift even when you change nothing. New listings in your subcategory push you down in search and browse surfaces. Watch impressions and page views weekly, as described in our guide to Chrome Web Store conversion rate.
• Competitor sets go stale quickly. The five competitors you tracked last year may not be the five that matter now. Re-check your category a few times a year and add newcomers that grow.
• Small numbers are normal. Most new extensions stay small, which makes your own early numbers easier to read in context. The usage statistics post has the percentiles.
• Speed and quality are differentiators. In a store full of quickly built tools, an extension that stays out of the way of page loads earns better reviews. See how to measure Chrome extension performance.

If you want these signals without building the pipeline yourself, Extenify tracks Chrome Web Store stats for your extension and for competitors in one dashboard: users, ratings, reviews, versions and category moves, across the Chrome Web Store, Edge Add-ons and Firefox Add-ons, with daily change alerts. Every plan starts with a 7-day free trial, no credit card required; see pricing for the details.

Frequently asked questions#

How many Chrome extensions are there?#

About 282,000 as of October 22, 2026, based on the Chrome Web Store sitemap (383,061 items) and a random sample of 4,000 listings. The rest of the store is roughly 81,000 themes and 17,000 legacy Chrome Apps.

How many Chrome extensions are there in total, including themes?#

The sitemap listed 383,061 items on October 22, 2026, and more than 99% of the sampled ones were live. That total includes extensions, themes and Chrome Apps.

Does Google publish an official number of Chrome extensions?#

No. Google does not publish a current count, and the figures in older articles come from independent counts in 2019, 2020 and 2024. The store's public sitemap is the most complete source available.

How many new Chrome extensions are published each month?#

About 17,000 a month in the third quarter of 2026, counting only extensions still listed in October. In 2025 the rate was about 5,000 a month.

Are there still Manifest V2 extensions in the Chrome Web Store?#

No extensions in our sample used Manifest V2. Google removed the remaining Manifest V2 extensions from the store on August 31, 2026. Some themes and all legacy Chrome Apps still declare Manifest V2.

What is the most common Chrome extension category?#

Productivity, with 72.9% of extensions. The single largest subcategory is Productivity: Tools, with 38.9%, followed by Workflow & Planning with 17.3%.

Summary#

The Chrome Web Store listed 383,061 items in October 2026: about 282,000 extensions, 81,000 themes and 17,000 Chrome Apps. Half of today's extensions were first published in 2026, at a rate that more than tripled from about 5,000 a month in 2025 to about 17,000 a month by the third quarter of 2026. All of them use Manifest V3, nearly three quarters sit in Productivity, and most are listed in English only. Only a third were updated in the last 90 days. For developers, the store is bigger and moving faster than the commonly quoted numbers suggest, which makes regular tracking of your own listing and your competitors more valuable than it was a year ago.

Image credits#

• Cover photo: Rows of colorful rubber ducks on shelves by karodel on the WordPress Photo Directory, CC0.