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Private company

Akismet

Logo: Automattic, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons3

Spam filtering service

Akismet is a service that filters spam from comments, trackbacks, and contact form messages. The filter operates by combining information about spam captured on all participating sites and then using those spam rules to block future spam. Akismet is offered by Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com.2 Wikipedia text CC BY-SA 4.0

Last updated Oct 21, 2026.

Overview

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Akismet is a service that filters spam from comments, trackbacks, and contact form messages. The filter operates by combining information about spam captured on all participating sites and then using those spam rules to block future spam. Akismet is offered by Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com. Akismet was launched on October 25, 2005.2

The story

The founder of Automattic, Matt Mullenweg, says that he decided to create Akismet so that his mother could blog in safety. In 2005, there were discussions about how to deal with comment spam, and only a few plug-ins were available for that purpose at the time. Mullenweg's first attempt was a JavaScript plug-in that modified the comment form and hid fields, but within hours of its launch spammers downloaded it, figured out how it worked, and bypassed it.

In late 2005, Mullenweg launched the Akismet plug-in for WordPress. Each time someone posts a comment to a participating website, Akismet checks it against all the comments in the database. If it is spam, it is deleted. If spam gets through and a user marks it as spam, the comment is added to the database so the pool of spam comments widens, making Akismet increasingly effective over time.

From Wikipedia’s article on Akismet, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.4

Subsidiaries and ownership

Owners

From Wikidata.1

Sources

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