You want to know how to tie a tie.
In 2026 that takes about a second. You ask a chatbot, it writes out seven steps, and you never open a website at all. Every text-only how-to page on the internet just lost that visitor.
wikiHow did not.
It answers 62,787 questions, and inside each one sits something a language model cannot produce: a custom picture for every single step. Photographed when the task is physical, hand-drawn when it is not. Somewhere around 880,000 of them, commissioned over two decades.
That is the most expensive way anyone has ever chosen to publish a how-to article. This is the story of why it turned out to be the right one.
Results at a glance
wikiHow makes a picture for every step of every article. It is slow, it costs real money, and it is the one part of a how-to page that cannot be generated on demand.
Twenty years later, that is the moat.
62,787 questions, all illustrated
Anyone can check the size of wikiHow in a minute. Its sitemap has two files: one holding 50,000 pages, another holding 12,787. That is the whole site — 62,787 articles, no estimate required.
The titles are exactly what you would expect from twenty years of people asking the internet for help. How to tie a tie. How to make felt balls. How to care for a fledgling if the mother leaves. How to stop a cat biting and scratching. How to get a girlfriend.
Ordinary questions, asked by ordinary people, answered one at a time.
What is not ordinary is what happens inside each article.
A picture for every step
We opened eight articles, spaced evenly through the sitemap rather than picked by hand, and counted the step pictures that belong to each one. The results were remarkably consistent: between 9 and 21 per article, averaging about 14.
Across 62,787 articles that is somewhere near 880,000 pictures. Every one made for the step it sits beside.
There is a quiet editorial rule underneath it, too. Physical tasks get photographs — the article on tying a tie is a real person's hands and a real tie. Social or abstract ones get drawings, because you cannot photograph "show her you are interesting."
Someone decided that, article by article, for twenty years.
The part AI cannot fake
Now put that next to what a language model does.
Ask it how to tie a tie and it will give you the steps instantly, accurately, free. The words on a how-to page have effectively become worthless, because the words are the easiest part to reproduce.
The pictures are not. Not a generic image of a necktie — the seventh specific position of one specific knot, matching the sentence beside it, consistent with the six images before it.
So wikiHow's moat is not its writing. It is the 880,000 things that had to be made by somebody, one at a time, and that nobody can regenerate on demand.
Twenty years ago that looked like an expensive habit. Today it looks like the only defensible decision on the page.
What the links say
We expected the expensive format to be defensive — something that protects visitors rather than earns anything. We were wrong.
Domain authority of 96 out of 100, and nearly half a million websites linking in. For comparison, we measured Zillow at 94 a few days earlier — from an archive of something like 118 million pages.
wikiHow gets there with 62,787.
The reason is not complicated. People link to a picture. A forum answer, a teacher's handout, a Reddit reply — when someone needs to show a step rather than describe it, they link to the page that already drew it. Nobody has ever linked to a database row.
Copy this in an afternoon
You are not going to commission 880,000 drawings. You do not need to. Four steps.
1. Ask what is cheap about your pages. Be honest. If a chatbot can produce the whole thing in one prompt, that page has no moat, however well written it is.
2. Find the one expensive ingredient you can actually afford. An original photo. A diagram you drew. A screenshot of your own product doing the thing. A number you measured yourself. It only has to be something that cannot be typed.
3. Put it where the reader needs it, not at the top. wikiHow's pictures sit beside the step they explain. A hero image at the top of the page is decoration; an image at the moment of confusion is the reason the page exists.
4. Do it consistently enough to become a format. One illustrated article is a nice article. Every article illustrated is a reason to link to you.
Start with the ten pages that matter most. That is an afternoon, not a decade.
What you cannot copy
Twenty years of accumulation. wikiHow began this in the mid-2000s, when making pictures was merely expensive rather than strategically brilliant. The library compounded quietly for two decades. You are starting today, and you should size the habit to what you can sustain.
The volunteer engine. A great deal of wikiHow was written and edited by people who were not paid to do it. That is very hard to manufacture deliberately.
And here is what we could not measure:
Our picture count is a floor, not a ceiling. We matched images by filename, so an article whose pictures are named differently from its title gets undercounted — the page on boiling an egg serves images named for a different phrasing entirely. The real number is higher than 880,000. We are publishing the conservative one.
We have no traffic figures for wikiHow or for anyone else here, and none are claimed. Everything above is a page count from a public sitemap, a sample we took ourselves, and our own link and audit tools.
We cannot see whether AI has cost wikiHow visitors. It very likely has. Our argument is only that the pictures are the part of the page that survives, not that nothing was lost.
Pages that contain something original tend to collect links; pages that only contain text tend not to. The same report we ran on wikiHow works on any website, and it will tell you within a minute which kind of pages you have been publishing.
- The same check that returned 455,245 referring domains for wikiHow
- Referring domains, anchors and the follow split
- 3 checks a day, no signup, no card
Frequently asked questions
How many articles does wikiHow have?
62,787 as of 22 August 2026. Its sitemap index points at exactly two files: one holding 50,000 pages, which is the maximum a single sitemap file may contain, and one holding 12,787. Because both were counted in full, this is an exact figure rather than an estimate.
How did you count the pictures?
We opened eight articles taken at fixed intervals through the sitemap, so the sample was not cherry-picked, and counted the distinct step images whose filenames belong to that article. The counts were 9, 13, 13, 21, 12, 17, 16 and 10, giving a mean of about 14. Multiplied across 62,787 articles that is roughly 880,000.
Why do you say the count is too low?
Because filename matching is imperfect. The article on boiling an egg, for example, serves images named for a different phrasing of the task, so our method would credit it with fewer pictures than it actually has. A naive count that simply totals every image tag on the page returns around 109 per article, but that figure is wrong in the other direction — it counts the same image at several sizes and includes thumbnails borrowed from other articles. The truth sits above 14 and well below 109, so we published the conservative end.
Are wikiHow's pictures drawings or photographs?
Both, and the choice is deliberate. Physical tasks tend to get photographs — the article on tying a tie shows a real person's hands. Social or abstract subjects get wikiHow's familiar hand-drawn illustrations, because some things cannot be photographed. Either way the image is made for that specific step.
What is wikiHow's backlink profile?
On 22 August 2026 our Backlink Analyzer returned Domain Rank 96 out of 100, 455,245 referring domains, 29,497,043 dofollow and 4,106,948 nofollow links, 178,932 referring IPs and 77,157 referring subnets.
How does that compare with the other sites in this series?
It is among the strongest we have measured, and by far the strongest for its size. Booking.com and Canva both returned 97, Zillow 94, and Calculator.net and Omni Calculator both 89. What makes wikiHow unusual is the ratio: 455,245 referring domains against 62,787 pages, where Zillow's 344,466 domains sit against an archive of roughly 118 million pages.
How did wikiHow score in a technical audit?
88 out of 100 on our Website Audit, with 1 critical issue, 2 warnings, 4 notices and 114 checks passed on the homepage. A good score, though not the cleanest in this series — Calculator.net, a far smaller site, returned 95 with no warnings at all.
Is "how to tie a tie" actually competitive?
Very. Our Keyword Research tool put it at a difficulty of 90 out of 100. The monthly volume for that exact phrasing is modest, at 2,792, but how-to searches fragment into thousands of variations, which is precisely why a site answering 62,787 of them has an advantage.
Decide what is expensive about your pages
Every company in this series answered a different question. RTINGS measures what nobody else measures. Wise turned one exchange rate into millions of pages. Zapier refuses to publish most of what it could. Canva lets its users make the pages. Booking invents new ways to want a hotel. Zillow never deletes a sold home. Calculator.net stopped building at 222 pages and let other sites do the publishing.
wikiHow answered the one that matters most in 2026: what part of this page could a machine not have made?
For a text-only article, the honest answer is now "none of it". For wikiHow, it is the 880,000 pictures — the slow, expensive, unglamorous part that everyone else skipped.
So look at your best page and ask what is expensive about it. If nothing is, that is the work.
And if you want to know which of your pages people already found worth linking to — check the profile. It takes a minute, and it is usually the pages with something original on them.
Measured on 22 August 2026. The article count comes from wikiHow's own sitemap, counted in full. The picture count is a sample of 8 articles taken at fixed intervals, with every count published in the FAQ above, and is deliberately conservative.
Link and audit figures are free runs of our own tools; exact values are in the FAQ. No traffic or revenue data for wikiHow was available to us and none is claimed here.