# Method

## Source

Archived homepages from one crawl in September 2026. Nothing was fetched for this report.
Each domain is counted once (an earlier pass counted some YC homepages twice because they
sat in two archive folders).
The Y Combinator, Inc 5000 2026 and unicorn homepages come from a rendered fetch (JavaScript run).
The B2B SaaS list comes from a plain HTML fetch, which misses logo sections that JavaScript adds
after load, so it finds fewer walls and fewer logos. We cannot say which way that moves its share.

## Customer-logo section

A homepage has a customer-logo section when one of these cue phrases appears
(case-insensitive) and three or more images follow it within 2,500 characters of HTML:

- trusted by
- customers
- used by
- loved by
- our clients
- companies like
- teams at
- join N (a number)
- customer stories

Integration sections headed "works with" are excluded. Two earlier cues, "powering" and
"backed by the best", were dropped because they picked up investor logos.

## Name matching

1. Take the alt text of every image inside the 2,500-character window.
2. Strip a trailing "logo", "icon" or "image".
3. Compare with Y Combinator company names: exact match, case-insensitive.
4. Only YC names that are 5 or more characters long and are not an English dictionary
   word, singular or plural (macOS `/usr/share/dict/words`), are used: 4,439 names.
5. The page's own company never counts.

## Household names

The second measure ignores these 43 well-known YC companies, so the result is not
driven by everyone showing Airbnb or Stripe. The list is our choice.

Airbnb, Amplitude, Benchling, Brex, Checkr, Coinbase, Cruise, Deel, Docker, DoorDash,
Dropbox, Faire, Fivetran, Flexport, GitLab, Groww, Gusto, Heroku, Instacart, Kalshi,
Lattice, Meesho, Mixpanel, Monzo, OpenSea, Optimizely, PagerDuty, PostHog, Rappi,
Razorpay, Reddit, Replit, Retool, Rippling, Segment, Stripe, Supabase, Twitch, Vanta,
Webflow, Whatnot, Zapier, Zepto

## Funnel

| List | Homepages | With a customer-logo section | Showing a YC company | Outside the household names |
|---|---:|---:|---:|---:|
| Y Combinator | 5,242 | 720 | 159 | 121 |
| Inc 5000 2026 | 4,814 | 478 | 9 | <5 |
| B2B SaaS list | 8,815 | 1,012 | 45 | 16 |
| Unicorns | 1,000 | 147 | 8 | 0 |

720 of 5,242 YC homepages (13.7%) have a detectable logo section; 159 of all 5,242 (3.0%)
show a YC company. Shares in the report are of logo sections.

## Hand check

40 walls read by hand: 31 clear customer walls, 1 uncertain customer, 4 partner or
integration lists, 4 doubtful or false. About one wall in five is not a clean customer
logo. The same rule and error sources apply to all four lists.

## Limits

- Alt text only. A logo without alt text, or with alt text that is not the company name, is missed on every list.
- Homepage only.
- Single crawl.
- Partner, integration or investor logos under a customer heading may pass as customers.
- A YC company name that is also a brand elsewhere can match the wrong logo.
- The B2B SaaS list was a plain fetch.
- The household list is our choice.