A Cisco Umbrella rank is a domain’s position in the Cisco Umbrella Popularity List, a free daily ranking of the top one million most-queried domains. Cisco builds it from Umbrella’s passive DNS data, which covers a very large volume of requests from users around the world.
The rank reflects how many unique client IP addresses look up a domain, relative to all requests across all domains. A rank of 1 is the most widely requested domain, and higher numbers are less popular.
Unlike browser-based rankings, the list counts DNS lookups from every application and device, not just people visiting websites. That is why infrastructure domains used by operating systems, content delivery networks, ad platforms and cloud services often rank near the top, above many well-known consumer sites. The list also includes subdomains, and Cisco publishes a separate ranking of top-level domains.
The data is published as a downloadable CSV file of rank and domain, updated daily. Researchers, security teams and SEO tools use it to spot trends, build allowlists or estimate a site’s reach.
Two cautions apply. First, a high Umbrella rank does not mean a domain is safe, since popular domains can still be abused. Second, the ranking reflects Umbrella’s own traffic rather than the whole internet, so it can differ from other popularity lists. With Umbrella moving into Cisco Secure Access, Cisco has not yet confirmed how the list will be maintained long term.