Assertion Partly supported AI assessment confidence: 85% certainty 4/5 debate potential 1/5

Mullenweg: Early Google survey showed WordPress on 0.8% of websites

Matt Mullenweg · Matt Mullenweg: How I Founded WordPress; Storytelling Tips; How to Give Feedback | 20VC #905 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings · Jul 11, 2022 · at 3:49

Matt Mullenweg, co-creator of WordPress and founder of Automattic, recounts the milestone moment when WordPress first registered in web-wide analytics data.

0:00 / 0:19exact quote · 19.8s

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“And shortly after that, maybe a year or two after that, we started to see WordPress show up in like whole internet numbers. And I remember the first time Google did a survey and they found this weird header in HTTP responses that they were like, we're not sure what this is, but it's on .8% of all the websites we looked at. And that was a header that WordPress added.”

quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →

The claim, plainly

An early web survey by Google found a specific HTTP header added by WordPress on 0.8% of the websites they surveyed.

a quote alone can be ambiguous, so this restates it with the references and context of the conversation around it resolved. AI-written; the tape below the player is the source.

Assessment

Matt Mullenweg accurately recalled that an early Google study (the Google Web Authoring Statistics report published in late 2005 / early 2006 by engineer Ian Hickson) discovered an HTTP header added by WordPress (`X-Pingback`) across its sample of over 1 billion web documents. However, while the report highlighted `X-Pingback` as the 30th most common HTTP header found in the study, primary records show the report did not state or publish the specific figure of 0.8% for the header.

Google's Web Authoring Statistics report (late 2005 / early 2006) sampled over 1 billion web documents and identified `X-Pingback` (an HTTP header added by WordPress) as the 30th most-seen header in its data.
Matt Mullenweg's contemporaneous blog post on January 25, 2006 cited Google's finding about the `X-Pingback` header.
Primary records of the Google report show it ranked `X-Pingback` 30th among HTTP headers but did not state a 0.8% figure.

Checked against

[1] w3.org [2] ma.tt

"Web Authoring Statistics" "WordPress" "X-Pingback" "Google" "survey"

assessed as of 2026-07-31

This assessment is an AI reading of a public statement, made against the cited references with the confidence shown. It can be wrong. The quote, the tape and the references are all on this page; if something is off, use report an error below. full disclaimer →

Mentioned

Google WordPress

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