Brand Center Benchmark 2026: what 788 brand centers contain

Most advice on brand centers describes what one should contain. Very little of it says what published brand centers actually contain. The Brand Center Benchmark counts it. It looks at 788 public brand guidelines sites, brand portals and press kits listed on brandcenter.gallery, and reports what their pages show, what they are built with and how they hand out files.

This first part covers the content: the features each site offers, the sections it shows and how sectors differ. Part 2 covers the platforms, and part 3 covers downloads, file formats and logins. Every chart is built from one dataset, which you can download under CC BY 4.0.

What is in the dataset?#

The dataset holds 788 sites, each published on brandcenter.gallery after a capture of its public pages. A site is a brand guidelines site, a brand portal (a library of approved files, often with an account) or a press and media kit.

Each site is filed under one or two sectors. Technology, education and the public sector make up most of the list, because those organisations publish their guidelines in the open more often than others. Read the sector charts with that in mind: a sector with 25 sites says less than one with 262.

Which features do brand centers have?#

Seven features were checked on every site: written guidelines, file downloads, search, browsing a library of assets, resources for partners, templates and campaign kits. A feature counts when the captured public pages show it.

Guidelines and downloads are close to universal. Search and asset browsing appear on about half the sites. Partner resources, templates and campaign kits are rare, even though they are what agencies, resellers and regional teams usually ask for.

The type of site changes the mix. Press kits lead on downloads and search, because journalists come for a logo or a photo. Brand portals lead on asset browsing. Templates are almost absent from press kits and appear on about a quarter of the other two types.

Guidelines, downloads and search are what most brand centers offer. Templates are on 17% of sites and partner resources on 22%, so a site with either one already does more than most.

How many features does a typical brand center have?#

Most sites offer a few of the seven, and very few offer all of them. The median site offers 3. Only 24 sites show six or seven, and 23 show none on their public pages.

The most common combinations are below. Guidelines, downloads and search together is the most frequent set.

Which sections do brand centers show?#

Each site has a list of top-level sections, read from its navigation and page headings. The topics below were matched on those names, so a site with a "Logo" or "Wordmark" section counts under logo. A site can match several topics.

The logo is the only topic on more than half the sites. Colour, typography and imagery follow far behind, and voice (11%), motion (4%), illustration (3%) and accessibility (1%) are rarer still.

Accessibility appears as a section name on 6 sites of 788. Some sites may cover contrast or alternative text inside their colour or typography pages, which this count does not see. A reader looking for accessibility rules still rarely finds them as a heading.

How do sectors differ?#

Sectors differ more than types do. Sports organisations show a logo section most often (71%), probably because crests and sponsor lockups need detailed rules. Technology and media companies show a colour section on 37% of sites, retailers on 3% and food and drink brands on 4%.

Education has the highest share for voice (17%) and the lowest for icons (1%). Consumer goods brands show photography most often (30%).

How long is a typical brand center?#

A brand center is usually short. The median site has 5 top-level sections, and four in five have 7 or fewer. Only 20 sites have 13 sections or more.

Which brand centers have the most features?#

24 sites show six or seven of the seven features. Two show all seven: Asana and Arizona State University. 12 of the other 22 miss only campaign kits, the rarest feature. The list mixes every type and many platforms, from Drupal and WordPress to Frontify, zeroheight and custom builds, which is the subject of part 2.

What the numbers mean if you are building one#

Three points come out of the counts. They describe what is common, and common is not the same as good.

• The baseline is guidelines, downloads and search. A reader who arrives on a brand center expects to read the rules, take a file and search for one. Missing any of the three puts a site below the median.
• The gaps are templates, partners and accessibility. These are rare, and they are what makes a brand center useful to people outside the brand team. Our guide on how to design a brand center covers each, and the brand center template gives a page outline.
• Short is normal. Five sections is the median. A logo page, a colour page, a typography page, an imagery page and a downloads page cover what most readers come for.

How we built the dataset#

• Sources. Sites came from a seed list of public brand guidelines sites, brand portals and press kits compiled for brandcenter.gallery. Sites whose owner asked to be removed are not included.
• Capture. An automated browser captured the public pages of each site (home page and the main sections), with screenshots and the page markup. Nothing behind a login was captured.
• Features. For each site, a language model read the captured pages and recorded each of the seven features as seen or not seen, citing the page evidence. A second automated pass checked each statement against the captured pages before publication, and the gallery corrects entries when an error is reported.
• Sections. The top-level sections are the names recorded for each site's navigation. Topics were matched on those names with fixed patterns, listed in the build command of this dataset.
• Platforms, formats and logins. Platforms were detected from the page markup, file formats from the links of each site's downloads, and logins from sign-in links, forms and walls on the captured pages. Part 2 and part 3 give the detail.

Limits:

• Only public pages were captured, so features behind a login are undercounted, above all on brand portals.
• A feature can be present on a page the capture did not reach.
• Topic matching works on section names in several languages but not all; a section called "Huisstijl" or "Marca" is not matched to a topic.
• The list is not a random sample. It over-represents organisations that publish their guidelines openly: technology companies, universities and public bodies.

Data last verified: 2026-10-27. The dataset is rebuilt when the gallery adds a large batch of sites.