Web fonts: a look under the hood

Google Web Fonts are viewed more than 1 billion times every day across the web, on more than 100 million web pages. To help you sort through and pick the right font for your site you can order fonts by popularity, and now you can check out usage data for each font too.

Click on "Analytics" in the upper right corner of the homepage to view the new analytics tab, where you can see and compare numbers for individual font views by browser, operating system and see usage trends.

You’ll see a list of fonts, ranked by the total number of all-time font views and sortable by time period. To see a graph of font data for an individual font or a set of fonts, check the box next to the font name and click on the Trend button.

Clicking the views by platform tab on the left pane shows you a heatmap and pie charts of usage of each font by browser or operating system.

While browsing through fonts in the directory, you can also access analytics for an individual font at anytime by navigating to the Statistics tab on the font’s specimen page.

And finally, to help you compare and select fonts, clicking on the “Pairings” tab on the Specimen page will show you groupings of fonts that are frequently used together, based on actual usage data via the API.

Selecting the right font for your website is an expression of your personal style, and we hope to continue expanding the set of tools to help you do that. Happy browsing!

Posted by Raziel Alvarez, Software Engineer