Just how much influence does Facebook wield over the Web? According to a study by Zyxt Labs, a lot. The Seattle-based lab studied roughly 1.3 billion URLs via Common Crawl and found that 22 percent of them reference Facebook.

Other interesting findings from the comprehensive study:

• 8 percent of the websites included implement open graph tags.
• Among ~500 million hardcoded links to Facebook, only 3.5 million are unique.
• There are more than 471 million total Facebook URLs.
• More than 242 million URLs involve Facebook in some manner.
• Naturally, the like button is the top Facebook URL, coming in at 15.69 percent

Zyxt Labs Founder Matthew Berk explains what this all means:

Increasingly, people and organizations will seek to write themselves not to websites, but to the big “platforms” (APIs) like Facebook and Twitter. And more and more, websites are being rewoven into those social networks, whether by simple inclusions of like or +1 buttons, or through more complex reflections of social connection.

When I look at the data, it’s pretty amazing. On Lucky Oyster, which is an alpha application for social discovery, it’s not uncommon for an occasional user of Facebook with only 20 friends to be intricately connected with upward of 20,000 entities. Active users with around 1,000 friends are consistently connected to well over 100,000 entities. I believe that reading this graph is different than reading the Web; it requires both a new mental model and new technology.

Readers: Do these figures surprise you?

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.