Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Abbreviations used:

Ambig = Ambiguous Race
MENA = Middle Eastern or North African
N.H. = Non-Human Skin Tones

Welcome to the 2026 AO3 Ship Stats!

As part of the AO3 Ship Stats project, this list shows the 100 fastest-growing relationship tags on Archive Of Our Own in the period July 29 2025 - July 26 2026. This list was created by comparing the current number of fics with data gathered for the 2025 AO3 Ship Stats.

There are 56 M/M relationships on the list, 15 F/M, 4 F/F, 17 Gen, 1 Poly and 7 Other. (Please note that on AO3, ‘Name & Name’ indicates platonic or familial ‘Gen’ relationships, while ‘Name/Name’ is used for romantic and sexual pairings.)

Of the 202 names on the list, 35 are women, 4 are non-binary, and 4 are characters of ambiguous gender, compared with 29, 2 and 10 in the 2025 list. In total there are 112 characters who are at least partially white, 62 Asian, 8 Black, 5 Latino, 5 Middle Eastern or North African, and 3 Roma, as well as 17 racially ambiguous characters and 25 characters with non-human skin tones. There are 93 characters who are solely white and 69 unambiguous Characters of Colour, which is 7 fewer than the number listed in 2025.

In order to prevent spam-posting from impacting these stats, works from users with very high posting rates have been removed from this data. This has affected the following relationship tags by the listed amounts:

• Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens) - 1048 total works - 18 during this year
• Dean Winchester & Sam Winchester - 672 total works - 9 during this year
• James Potter/Lily Evans Potter - 10678 total works - 6554 during this year
• Jinu/Rumi (KPop Demon Hunters) - 366 total works - 366 during this year
• Regulus Black/James Potter - 494 total works - 0 during this year
• Robin Buckley/Nancy Wheeler - 2722 total works - 188 during this year
• Sherlock Holmes & John Watson - 1266 total works - 801 during this year

Since I am sure it will be of interest, I would like to note that "Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov" has set a new record for the highest number of works gained by a relationship in a single year period since these stats began. The previous record was 20,298 works, set by "Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)" in the 2020 list.

For more information about the AO3 Ship Stats project, please check out the accompanying FAQs. You might also be interested in the All-Time Top 100 Pairings and the Femslash Top 100 list.

Edit 26 Jul 2026: Corrected to update the gender and race of all characters from The Amazing Digital Circus to reflect the final episode.

Edit 27 Jul 2026: Corrected to fix race for Avery | AveryTheMayo, Derek Hutchins | d3rLord3, and Sanji.