Originally published on Extenify.
Chrome extension usage statistics are almost never published, so most developers have no idea whether their user count is good. A random sample of 2,947 Chrome Web Store listings from October 2026 gives a blunt answer: the median extension has 13 users, and only about 9% ever reach 1,000. If you just shipped your first extension and feel stuck at double digits, here is where you actually stand.
How the sample was built
The store had 383,061 items in its sitemap on October 22, 2026. The Extenify team picked 4,000 at random and opened every listing; 2,947 turned out to be extensions (the rest were themes, old Chrome Apps or dead listings). For each one they recorded the public user count, rating, number of ratings and first publish date.
A few things to keep in mind when reading the numbers:
- The listing number is weekly users (browsers that have the extension installed and running), not lifetime downloads.
- Small counts are exact; big ones are rounded (80,000, 200,000 and so on).
- 12.1% of listings show no user count at all. Most were published in 2025 or 2026, and they are counted as zero.
- With this sample size, shares are accurate to roughly 2 percentage points at 95% confidence. The very top of the store is too thin to measure: only one sampled extension had over a million users.
The percentile table you can benchmark against
| Users | Share of extensions at or above | Roughly how many extensions |
|---|---|---|
| 10 | 56.5% | ~160,000 |
| 100 | 23.3% | ~66,000 |
| 1,000 | 9.2% | ~26,000 |
| 10,000 | 2.8% | ~8,000 |
| 100,000 | 0.5% | ~1,500 |
Put differently: the 25th percentile is 4 users, the median 13, the 75th percentile 84 and the 90th percentile 833. 100 users already puts you in the top quarter of the store. 1,000 puts you in roughly the top 10%.
If you want a quick sanity check in code, a tiny lookup on those milestones is enough:
// Milestones from the Oct 2026 sample: [users, share of extensions at or above] const tiers = [[100000, 0.005], [10000, 0.028], [1000, 0.092], [100, 0.233], [10, 0.565]]; const standing = (users) => { const hit = tiers.find(([min]) => users >= min); return hit ? `top ${(hit[1] * 100).toFixed(1)}%` : 'bottom ~44%'; }; console.log(standing(250)); // "top 23.3%" The original post includes a log-scale interpolation function if you want a precise percentile instead of a tier.
Averages lie: the top 1% holds 80% of users
The mean in the sample was about 3,000 users. The median was 13. That gap is the whole story of the store:
- The top 1% of extensions hold about 80.5% of all sampled users.
- The top 10% hold 98.2%.
- The bottom 90% share just 1.8%.
A random sample rarely catches the giants, so real concentration is probably even higher. Grammarly's listing alone showed 41 million users in October 2026. Never benchmark against "average users per extension"; it describes almost nobody.
For comparison, DebugBear measured a median of 17 installs back in 2020. The tail has gotten longer, mostly because of the flood of new extensions published in 2026.
Age changes everything
Half of today's listings were first published in 2026, which drags the numbers down:
| First published | Median users | Share with 1,000+ |
|---|---|---|
| Before 2020 | 1,000 | 57.9% |
| 2020 to 2023 | 87 | 23.4% |
| 2024 | 41 | 14.4% |
| 2025 | 16 | 6.4% |
| 2026 | 7 | 1.5% |
Be careful with this table. Old extensions are survivors: the ones that broke, were abandoned or never moved to Manifest V3 are gone. Treat each row as "where an extension of this age usually sits today", not as a growth curve. Drop the 2026 cohort and the median for established extensions rises to 40 users, with 17.1% past 1,000.
Ratings follow users
Only 43.7% of extensions have even one rating. Below 100 users, that falls to 31.9%; between 1,000 and 9,999 users it is 93.1%, with a median of 9 ratings. Among extensions with at least ten ratings, the median score is 4.5 stars and 77.2% sit at 4 stars or above. So a 4.0 looks below average to visitors, and with few ratings a single review can swing your score hard.
What to do with these numbers
- Benchmark with percentiles, and against extensions of a similar age.
- Track growth as a rate. 40 to 80 users is the same 100% growth as 40,000 to 80,000.
- Watch the dashboard, not only the listing. The public number is rounded and lags behind.
- Follow a peer group. Pick five similar extensions in your subcategory and log their users and ratings daily, so you can tell whether a flat week is you or the whole category.
Key takeaways
- The median Chrome extension has 13 users; three in four have fewer than 100.
- 9.2% reach 1,000 users, 2.8% reach 10,000 and 0.5% reach 100,000.
- The top 1% of extensions hold about 80% of users, so averages are useless as benchmarks.
- 2026 extensions have a median of 7 users; pre-2020 survivors have 1,000.
- Fewer than half of extensions have a single rating.
The full write-up, with the methodology, an interpolation function and a FAQ, is in the Chrome extension usage statistics report on Extenify. If you want to track your own extension and its competitors across Chrome, Edge and Firefox, Extenify's store analytics and change alerts record users, ratings and versions daily.
Where does your extension sit on this curve, and how long did it take you to get past your first 100 users?
