Who Uses Squarespace? 15 Big Names, Checked (2026)
Our 2023 list didn't hold up, so we checked 15 well-known sites on Squarespace in October 2026, plus what's changed at the company since.
Squarespace is used by about 2.4% of all websites, according to W3Techs in October 2026. Well-known names on it today include Zendaya, Tony Hawk, John Malkovich, chef Marcus Samuelsson, Eleven Madison Park, YWCA USA and The Skatepark Project. We checked each one by loading the live site on 25 October 2026 and looking for Squarespace’s own code in the page. Most of the “big brands on Squarespace” lists you’ll find, including the one we published in 2023, are out of date.
Updated 25 October 2026. The first version of this post (April 2023) listed ten big brands and the Squarespace template each one used. We tried to verify all ten on 25 October 2026 and could confirm only one of them on Squarespace today, The Skatepark Project (formerly the Tony Hawk Foundation). That 2023 list never showed its workings, so treat this as a correction rather than a migration count: seven of the ten showed other platforms, one had no live site, and one blocked our check. This version replaces the list with sites we verified on Squarespace this month, and adds what’s changed at the company since 2023.
TL;DR
- One of our 2023 ten could be confirmed on Squarespace today: The Skatepark Project (formerly the Tony Hawk Foundation). HBO, Lyft, Tony Robbins, the Museum of Sex, Arch Motorcycle, Veuve Clicquot and National Geographic Kids showed other platforms when we checked. The Wing had no live site. WeWork blocked our check, so its platform is unknown.
- 15 well-known sites are on Squarespace today, from Zendaya to Eleven Madison Park. They are mostly public figures, restaurants, nonprofits and creative businesses, not large corporations.
- That matches the data. Squarespace runs 2.4% of all websites but only 0.3% of the top million sites whose platform W3Techs can identify.
- Squarespace is now private. Permira bought it for about $7.2 billion in October 2024. Founder Anthony Casalena is still CEO.
- The 2023 template names can’t be checked anymore. Squarespace 7.1 has one template family, so “built on the Bedford template” is no longer a meaningful claim for most sites.
What happened to the 2023 list
We loaded each site on 25 October 2026 and looked at the page code and server headers. Squarespace sites identify themselves (see how to check a site yourself below). Here is where each of the original ten stands.
| Brand (2023 list) | On Squarespace now? | What the site runs today |
|---|---|---|
| HBO Documentary Films | No | Next.js |
| National Geographic Kids | No | Custom National Geographic / Disney front end |
| Arch Motorcycle | No | WordPress |
| WeWork | Unknown | The site blocked our check (HTTP 403) |
| Tony Hawk Foundation, now The Skatepark Project | Yes | Squarespace 7.1 |
| Lyft Business | No | Next.js |
| Museum of Sex | No | WordPress (WP Engine, Elementor) |
| Tony Robbins | No | Next.js |
| The Wing | No | No live site: thewing.com is a redirect stub |
| Veuve Clicquot | No | Salesforce Commerce Cloud |
One in ten could be confirmed. The template names in the old post (Montauk, Bedford, Brine, Mercer and so on) belong to Squarespace 7.0. Version 7.1 still gives its starting designs names (Paloma, for example), but every 7.1 site shares one template family, so a name alone tells you little about the finished site, and a shared template ID can’t confirm an old named-template claim.
Several current “Squarespace examples” lists still include brands on other platforms. When we checked one popular list, updated in October 2026, Arch Motorcycle, Studio McGee and Oishii were all on other platforms, and several of its restaurant links were broken (two returned 404, one failed to resolve). If you’re choosing a platform based on who else uses it, check the site yourself first.
15 well-known sites on Squarespace in 2026
Every site below was checked on 25 October 2026 and contained Squarespace’s own markers in the page. “7.1” and “7.0” are the Squarespace versions the page reports.
Public figures
| Name | Site | Version |
|---|---|---|
| Zendaya | zendaya.com | 7.1 |
| Tony Hawk | tonyhawk.com | 7.1 |
| John Malkovich (his fashion label) | johnmalkovich.com | Squarespace (version not shown) |
| Marcus Samuelsson | marcussamuelsson.com | 7.0 |
| Randy Rogers Band | randyrogersband.com | 7.0 |
| The Sorry Girls (YouTube design duo) | thesorrygirls.com | 7.1 |
John Malkovich’s store has a history with Squarespace. In 2017 Squarespace announced it had built the site with him and released a template based on it. Tony Hawk’s personal site is separate from The Skatepark Project’s, and both are on Squarespace.
Restaurants and hospitality
| Name | Site | Version |
|---|---|---|
| Eleven Madison Park (New York) | elevenmadisonpark.com | 7.1 |
| Streetbird (Marcus Samuelsson’s restaurant brand) | streetbirdnyc.com | 7.0 |
| Cutler (Melbourne, formerly Cutler & Co) | cutlerandco.com.au | 7.1 |
| Bathhouse (New York bathhouse and spa) | abathhouse.com | 7.1 |
Restaurants are well represented: a restaurant site mostly needs good photography, a menu, hours and a booking link, which Squarespace does well. Squarespace owned the restaurant booking platform Tock from 2021 until it sold it to American Express in October 2024. These restaurants stayed on Squarespace for the website itself.
Nonprofits
| Name | Site | Version |
|---|---|---|
| YWCA USA | ywca.org | 7.1 |
| The Skatepark Project | skatepark.org | 7.1 |
YWCA is the largest Squarespace example we found. Squarespace’s 2024 case study describes YWCA USA migrating its national site and 75 local association sites onto Squarespace Enterprise (the original page is gone; an archived copy from November 2025 is linked below). We checked the national site. We didn’t check the local sites one by one.
Brands and businesses
| Name | Site | Version |
|---|---|---|
| Yondr (phone-free pouches for schools and concerts) | overyondr.com | 7.1 |
| TinySeed (startup accelerator) | tinyseed.com | 7.1 |
| Edible Boston (food magazine) | edibleboston.com | 7.0 |
Notice who isn’t here: big public companies. Squarespace’s enterprise case studies point to organisations that run many similar sites (YWCA’s local chapters, real-estate agents at SERHANT), not to a corporation’s main website. SERHANT’s own homepage, when we checked, ran on Luxury Presence, not Squarespace.
How to tell if a website uses Squarespace
You don’t need a paid tool. Open the site in a desktop browser, right-click, choose View Page Source, and search the page (Ctrl+F or Cmd+F) for any of these:
This is Squarespace.— an HTML comment near the top of every Squarespace page.static1.squarespace.comorimages.squarespace-cdn.com— where Squarespace hosts the site’s files and images.Static.SQUARESPACE_CONTEXT— the settings object Squarespace adds to the page."templateVersion":"7.1"or"templateVersion":"7"— tells you whether it’s Squarespace 7.1 or the older 7.0.
These are signals to combine, checked on the site’s own pages, not any single proof. Squarespace asset URLs alone aren’t enough: a page can load a Squarespace-hosted file without being a Squarespace site. And if none of these appear, that is inconclusive rather than proof the site isn’t on Squarespace: a blocked or partial fetch (we hit a 403 on WeWork, for example) can’t classify the site behind it. Technology lookup sites such as BuiltWith or Wappalyzer use the same kind of signal, but their records can be months old.
Why most big brands aren’t on Squarespace
W3Techs’ October 2026 numbers show the pattern clearly:
| Platform | Share of all websites | Share of sites with a known CMS | Share of top 1M sites with a known CMS |
|---|---|---|---|
| WordPress | 39.6% | 58.3% | 48.2% |
| Shopify | 5.3% | 7.9% | — |
| Wix | 4.2% | 6.2% | — |
| Squarespace | 2.4% | 3.6% | 0.3% |
Squarespace is the fourth-largest website platform. Its share of known-CMS sites has grown slowly, from 3.0% in October 2023 to 3.6% in October 2026. But it’s a small-business platform. Among the highest-traffic sites it almost disappears.
The reasons are in Squarespace’s own help pages:
- Limited code access on 7.1. The Squarespace Developer Platform, which lets a developer edit a template’s code, only works on version 7.0. You can add custom code to a 7.1 site in some places, but you can’t change the core template or add code that runs on the server.
- No headless option. Content is edited in Squarespace and served by Squarespace. A team that wants its own front end (Next.js, Astro or similar) with Squarespace as the content source can’t do that.
- Multilingual is a workaround. Squarespace recommends the Weglot integration for multiple languages. Without it, checkout and other built-in text is in one language, the site has one currency, and you can’t give each language its own domain or subdomain.
- Commerce fees on lower plans. As of October 2026, Squarespace’s own fee table lists commerce transaction fees of 2% on Basic and 0% on Core, Plus and Advanced (digital-product fees and payment-processor rates are separate). The Orders, Inventory and Transactions APIs are available on Core and above, not only on Advanced.
None of that matters much for a chef, a musician or a spa. It matters a lot for a company with ten markets, a product catalogue fed from another system, or a developer team.
Squarespace in 2026: what’s changed since our first post
Who owns Squarespace
Squarespace is privately owned by the investment firm Permira. The deal was announced in May 2024 at $44 a share and closed on 17 October 2024, at a total value of about $7.2 billion after Permira raised its offer. Squarespace left the New York Stock Exchange. Founder Anthony Casalena kept a large stake and is still CEO and board chairman. Earlier investors Accel and General Atlantic stayed in.
Headquarters and size
Squarespace is headquartered in New York City. Its website currently lists 8 Clarkson Street. Its last public annual report (filed February 2024) gave 225 Varick Street.
Because it’s private, Squarespace no longer publishes results. The last public figures: $1.01 billion revenue in 2023, and over 5.2 million unique subscriptions at 30 June 2024, in more than 200 countries and territories.
Big moves since 2023
| When | What |
|---|---|
| Sep 2023 | Bought Google Domains’ assets (about 10 million domains) for $180.7 million. Squarespace said the move to its systems was finished in November 2024. |
| Sep 2024 | Launched an upgraded Blueprint AI, which builds a starting site from your goals and brand style. |
| Oct 2024 | Taken private by Permira. Sold Tock to American Express for $400 million. |
| Sep 2025 | Refresh 2025: Beacon AI (an AI business assistant) and a set of “AI Optimization” tools alongside its SEO tools. |
| Oct 2025 | Became the website partner for Perplexity’s Comet browser: Comet users can plan and build a site on Squarespace from inside the browser. |
| Dec 2025 | Pay Links, for taking payments without a full online store. |
| Jul 2026 | AI Visibility: a dashboard on 7.1 plans that suggests test prompts, shows where a business appears in AI search, and compares competitors. |
| Sep 2026 | Blueprint AI now builds a full multi-page site, plus Image Studio for creating and editing images in the editor. |
Squarespace and AI search
This is the part that changed most since 2023, and it’s the part we work on: how ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini and Grok find and cite a business. Here’s what we saw on the Squarespace sites above.
- AI crawlers are allowed by default. All five robots.txt files we checked (Zendaya, Eleven Madison Park, YWCA, Tony Hawk, The Skatepark Project) name AI bots like GPTBot, ClaudeBot and Google-Extended, but none of them block those bots from the site.
- Blocking is one switch. Squarespace has a setting, under Settings > Crawlers, called “Block known artificial intelligence crawlers.” As of October 2026 it asks 26 named bots at once not to crawl the site, and Squarespace warns that compliance isn’t guaranteed. You can’t block one company’s bot and allow another’s. The published list doesn’t include the bots that fetch pages for live AI answers, such as OAI-SearchBot (ChatGPT search), Claude-SearchBot or PerplexityBot, though it does include some live-answer crawlers such as DuckAssistBot.
- Structured data is thin on homepages, and partly locked. On the four homepages we checked (Zendaya, Eleven Madison Park, YWCA, The Skatepark Project), each carried a basic
WebSiteschema block and two addedLocalBusiness. That’s an observation about four homepages, not a measured citation penalty: Google says there’s “no special schema.org structured data that you need to add” to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, and Squarespace adds Blog, Event, Organization and Product schema automatically where applicable. The real limit is control: generated schemas can’t be edited or removed, though you can add your own JSON-LD with code injection on Core and above. Article and FAQ markup doesn’t belong on every homepage, so its absence there isn’t itself a defect. - llms.txt exists but is off by default. None of the four sites we tested serve
/llms.txt. Squarespace 7.1 does offer a native llms.txt option (SEO settings), but the site owner has to add text and save before the file is served, and none of our four samples had done so. - Squarespace now measures AI visibility itself. The July 2026 AI Visibility tool is a sign the company knows its customers care. It shows where a site appears; it doesn’t change how the site is built.
The practical upshot: a Squarespace site can be found and cited by AI engines. The limits are in how much you can control: per-bot rules, editing the built-in schema, and page speed. That’s usually where a site starts to outgrow the platform.
When Squarespace makes sense, and when to move
Squarespace is a good fit if you’re a person, a restaurant, a studio, a nonprofit or a small shop, you want to edit the site yourself, and you don’t need custom code, several languages or a separate front end. The names in this post prove it can look world-class.
It’s time to look elsewhere if you need several languages or currencies, content coming from another system, a developer team shipping changes, full control over schema and AI crawler rules, or faster pages than the platform allows. We hit those limits on our own site and moved webbROI off Squarespace to Astro and Cloudflare.
We built on Squarespace for ten years. We no longer take on new Squarespace builds, but we still help Squarespace owners:
- Staying on Squarespace? We can improve how the site shows up in AI answers (AEO), and our plugins, like the Universal Filter, are on squarewebsites.org.
- Ready to move? We rebuild sites on Astro and Cloudflare and keep your URLs.
- Not sure how AI engines see you now? Run the free AI Visibility Check. It covers ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini and Grok.
Squarespace FAQ
Who uses Squarespace? Mostly small businesses, creatives, restaurants and nonprofits. Well-known names verified on Squarespace in October 2026 include Zendaya, Tony Hawk, John Malkovich, Marcus Samuelsson, Eleven Madison Park, YWCA USA and The Skatepark Project.
Do big companies use Squarespace? Rarely for their main website. Squarespace runs 2.4% of all websites but only 0.3% of the top million sites with a known platform. Large organisations that do use it, like YWCA USA, tend to use Squarespace Enterprise to run many similar local or agent sites.
Who owns Squarespace? The private equity firm Permira. It completed its purchase of Squarespace on 17 October 2024 in a deal worth about $7.2 billion. Founder Anthony Casalena is still CEO and chairman and remains one of the largest shareholders.
Where is Squarespace headquartered? New York City. Squarespace’s website lists 8 Clarkson Street; its last public annual report, from February 2024, listed 225 Varick Street.
How can I tell if a website is built on Squarespace? View the page source and search for “This is Squarespace.”, “static1.squarespace.com” or “Static.SQUARESPACE_CONTEXT”. These are signals to combine on the site’s own pages: asset URLs alone don’t prove it, and finding nothing is inconclusive if the fetch was blocked. The templateVersion value tells you whether it’s version 7.1 or 7.0.
Do Squarespace templates still have names? Yes, but on version 7.1 the names describe starting designs (Paloma, for example), not different feature families: every 7.1 site shares one template family. Only the older version 7.0 had distinct named templates like Bedford, Brine and Montauk.
Is Squarespace good for ecommerce? For a small catalogue, yes: it handles products, subscriptions, digital goods and payments. As of October 2026, commerce transaction fees are 2% on Basic and 0% on Core, Plus and Advanced (digital-product fees and processor rates are separate), and the commerce APIs are available on Core and above. Larger stores often choose Shopify, which runs 5.3% of all websites to Squarespace’s 2.4%, but that’s market share, not proof of a better fit for any particular store.
Is Squarespace good for AI search? It’s workable. Squarespace sites allow AI crawlers by default and Squarespace now has an AI Visibility tool. But you get one on/off switch for AI crawlers rather than per-bot rules, you can’t edit or remove the built-in schema, and the native llms.txt option is off until the site owner enables it, which limits how far you can tune the site for answer engines.
Bibliography
Show sources
- W3Techs, “Usage statistics and market share of Squarespace,” retrieved 25 October 2026. https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/cm-squarespace
- W3Techs, “Usage statistics of content management systems,” 25 October 2026. https://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/content_management
- W3Techs, “Squarespace vs. WordPress usage statistics,” 25 October 2026. https://w3techs.com/technologies/comparison/cm-squarespace,cm-wordpress
- W3Techs, “Historical yearly trends in the usage statistics of content management systems,” October 2026. https://w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/content_management/ms/q
- Permira, “Squarespace to go private in $6.9bn all-cash transaction with Permira,” 13 May 2024. https://www.permira.com/news-and-insights/announcements/squarespace-to-go-private-in-69bn-all-cash-transaction-with-permira/
- Permira, “Permira completes acquisition of Squarespace,” 17 October 2024. https://www.permira.com/news-and-insights/announcements/permira-completes-acquisition-of-squarespace/
- TechCrunch, “Permira completes Squarespace acquisition after upping bid to $7.2B,” 17 October 2024. https://techcrunch.com/2024/10/17/permira-completes-squarespace-acquisition-after-upping-bid-to-7-2b/
- Squarespace, Form 10-K for fiscal 2023, filed 28 February 2024. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1496963/000149696324000010/sqsp-20231231.htm
- Squarespace, “Squarespace Announces Second Quarter 2024 Financial Results,” 2 August 2024. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/squarespace-announces-second-quarter-2024-financial-results-302212968.html
- Squarespace, “Squarespace Completes Acquisition of Google Domains Assets,” 7 September 2023. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/squarespace-completes-acquisition-of-google-domains-assets-301921300.html
- Squarespace Newsroom, “Squarespace Domains updates,” 14 November 2024. https://newsroom.squarespace.com/blog/squarespace-domains-updates
- Squarespace, “American Express Completes Acquisition of Tock,” 15 October 2024. https://www.squarespace.com/press-releases/2024/10/15/american-express-completes-acquisition-of-tock
- Squarespace, “Squarespace Refresh 2024,” 24 September 2024. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/squarespace-refresh-2024-introducing-a-new-era-for-entrepreneurs-302253451.html
- Squarespace Newsroom, “Squarespace Refresh 2025,” 30 September 2025. https://newsroom.squarespace.com/blog/squarespace-refresh-2025-built-to-stand-out-ready-to-scale
- Squarespace Newsroom, “Squarespace and Perplexity partner to reimagine business creation in the AI era,” 2 October 2025. https://newsroom.squarespace.com/blog/squarespace-and-perplexity-partner-to-reimagine-business-creation-in-the-ai-era
- Squarespace Newsroom, “Squarespace Introduces Pay Links,” 18 December 2025. https://newsroom.squarespace.com/blog/squarespace-introduces-pay-links
- Squarespace Newsroom, “AI Visibility helps businesses navigate the shift to AI-powered search,” 7 July 2026. https://newsroom.squarespace.com/blog/ai-visibility-helps-businesses-navigate-the-shift-to-ai-powered-search
- Squarespace Blog, “Product updates, September 2026,” 21 September 2026. https://www.squarespace.com/blog/product-updates-september-2026
- Squarespace Help, “Request that AI models exclude your site,” updated July 2026. https://support.squarespace.com/hc/en-us/articles/360022347072-Request-that-AI-models-exclude-your-site
- Squarespace Help, “Squarespace Developer Platform FAQ,” updated July 2025. https://support.squarespace.com/hc/en-us/articles/206545717-Squarespace-Developer-Platform-FAQ
- Squarespace Help, “Manually creating a multilingual site,” updated March 2026. https://support.squarespace.com/hc/en-us/articles/16552875658765-Manually-creating-a-multilingual-site
- Squarespace Help, “Template comparison charts,” updated August 2025. https://support.squarespace.com/hc/en-us/articles/228344967-Template-comparison-charts
- Squarespace Enterprise, “How YWCA empowers change,” June 2024 (original page removed; archived copy 5 November 2025). http://web.archive.org/web/20251105014542/https://www.squarespace.com/enterprise/resources/how-ywca-empowers-change
- Squarespace Help, “Create an llms.txt file.” https://support.squarespace.com/hc/en-us/articles/47434125611277-Create-an-llms-txt-file
- Squarespace Help, “Transaction fees and payment processing rates.” https://support.squarespace.com/hc/en-us/articles/27853679334157-Transaction-fees-and-payment-processing-rates
- Squarespace Help, “Squarespace API keys.” https://support.squarespace.com/hc/en-us/articles/236297987-Squarespace-API-keys
- Squarespace Newsroom, “John Malkovich x Squarespace,” 10 January 2017. https://newsroom.squarespace.com/blog/john-malkovich-x-squarespace
- Squarespace, pricing page, retrieved 25 October 2026. https://www.squarespace.com/pricing
- Site Builder Report, “Beautiful Examples of Squarespace Websites,” updated 14 October 2026. https://www.sitebuilderreport.com/squarespace-examples
- Google Search Central, “AI features and your website.” https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/ai-features
- OpenAI, “Overview of OpenAI crawlers.” https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/bots
- Anthropic, “Does Anthropic crawl data from the web, and how can site owners block the crawler?” https://support.claude.com/en/articles/8896518-does-anthropic-crawl-data-from-the-web-and-how-can-site-owners-block-the-crawler
- Perplexity, “Perplexity crawlers.” https://docs.perplexity.ai/docs/resources/perplexity-crawlers
- Live site checks (page source and response headers) for every site named in this post, by WebbROI, 25 October 2026.