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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Bytram:

Is it because websites are converging on what boosts search rank? Or maybe there is a consolidation in the frameworks used to build web sites? Perhaps users gravitate to using sites whose layouts are "familiar"?

Yes, websites really are starting to look more similar:

Over the past few years, articles and blog posts have started to ask some version of the same question: "Why are all websites starting to look the same?"

These posts usually point out some common design elements, from large images with superimposed text, to hamburger menus, which are those three horizontal lines that, when clicked, reveal a list of page options to choose from.

My colleagues Bardia Doosti, David Crandall, Norman Su and I were studying the history of the web when we started to notice these posts cropping up. None of the authors had done any sort of empirical study, though. It was more of a hunch they had.

We decided to investigate the claim to see if there were any truth to the notion that websites are starting to look the same and, if so, explore why this has been happening. So we ran a series of data mining studies that scrutinized nearly 200,000 images across 10,000 websites.

[...] This outsize power is part a larger story of consolidation in the tech industry—one that certainly could be a cause for concern. We believe aesthetic consolidation should be critically examined as well.

Original Submission