The Prevalence of Single Sign-On on the Web: Towards the Next Generation of Web Content Measurement
Calvin Ardi, Matt Calder · 2023
Much of the content and structure of the Web remains inaccessible to evaluate at scale because it is gated by user authentication. This limitation restricts researchers to examining only a superficial layer of a website: the landing page or public, search-indexable pages. Since it is infeasible to create individual accounts across thousands of webpages, we examine the prevalence of Single Sign-On (SSO) on the web to explore the feasibility of using a few accounts to authenticate to many sites. We find that 58% of the top 10K websites with logins are accessible with popular 3rd-party SSO providers, such as Google, Facebook, and Apple, indicating that leveraging SSO offers a scalable solution to access a large volume of user-gated content.