Sometimes, we watch the news—and have thoughts about it. “The Orb Industry Watch” unpacks the policies, market shifts, and power plays shaping global expansion and the language industry.
Let’s say you wake up one day and, by some coincidence or divine comedy, you’re asked to rank the most globally competent websites on the planet. What would you measure? Word count? Flag emojis? How many local payment methods they support in Bulgaria? The real answer (or at least a real answer) lives in John Yunker’s 2025 Web Globalisation Report Card, and it dropped last week with the usual quiet confidence of a long-serving archivist who’s been watching the internet globalise itself since Netscape had a pulse.
The top performer this year? Wegmans. Yes, a grocery chain. Not a global logistics firm. Not a bleeding-edge tech startup. A purveyor of produce. If you’re surprised, you’re in good company. But Wegmans' rise says something precise and important about the direction of the internet and how little most companies understand about meeting people where they are, in the language they actually speak, using words that actually mean something.
What Is This Report, Really?
This isn’t a design award. It’s not a UX popularity contest. The Report Card is an annual, deeply comparative analysis of how major brands execute web globalisation, which to be specific, includes things like:
- How many languages a website supports
- How easy it is for users to switch between languages
- How well a site adapts to different scripts and regional conventions
- How consistent the brand feels across geographies
There’s also a hidden metric I suspect Yunker tracks intuitively: How much the company seems to care. Or more formally: how much intention is embedded in the localisation system as a whole.
Because make no mistake, these rankings aren’t just about volume. More pages in more languages don’t automatically make for a better experience. In fact, without structural support (global templates, consistent navigation patterns, culturally sensitive content), they often create the illusion of care while delivering something closer to entropy.
The Winners Are the Ones Who Think in Systems
Wegmans tops the list not because they went on a wild language spree, but because they’ve quietly built a system that respects the user’s context. They’ve architected for localisation, not simply added it in post. The result is a digital presence that feels not only available in multiple languages, but native to them. And that’s rare.
Other top scorers like Adobe, IKEA, and Airbnb demonstrate similar systemic thinking. These are not just brands that translated their headers and called it a day. These are teams that thought about navigation consistency, language detection, regional content variation, scalable design systems, and how to preserve the integrity of their brand voice across cultures.
There’s an analogy here to clear writing: anyone can stuff a thesaurus into a paragraph. But it takes discipline to write a sentence that says exactly what it means to say. Nothing more, nothing less. The same is true of multilingual UX.
A Brief Note on the Internet’s Actual Shape
Here’s a helpful reminder, particularly for those working in U.S.-centric companies: more than three-quarters of internet users are outside the Anglosphere. Most of them don’t think in English. Many of them don’t read English. The internet, in real terms, is not a default-English experience. It only appears that way if you’re standing in one particular room, in one particular house, on one particular street, and looking in one particular direction.
Good global websites turn around. They look out the window.
Why This Matters (Even If You Don’t Localise Yet)
You may not be designing a multinational checkout flow today. But the principles that drive good globalisation (clarity, consistency, careful intent, contextual empathy) are the same principles that underpin good interface design, period. Thinking globally forces you to write better content. To build more resilient components. To consider edge cases not just as bugs, but as normal use cases reframed.
Or, put differently: designing for the world makes your website better for everyone, including the people across the street.
One Takeaway (And Then I’ll Let You Go)
If you’re a product manager, designer, or localisation lead, the 2025 Report Card is a gift. Not because it tells you what’s “hot,” but because it shows what’s structurally sound. The sites at the top aren’t necessarily beautiful in the traditional, award-show sense. But they are legible, durable, and intelligently built for scale. They think ahead.
And perhaps that’s the real mark of quality in any system, global or otherwise.
Link to the full list here: The Top 25 Websites from the 2025 Web Globalisation Report Card
And if you’re building something multilingual this quarter: yes, we should probably talk.
