189 Landing Pages. 25 Had a Dark Mode.

Coding agents add a dark mode toggle to almost anything you ask them to build. It is cheap, it looks thorough, and it reads as a sign the developer thought about the user. Production marketing sites mostly do not do this, and the exception is specific enough to be worth knowing.

Every screenshot in the swaggin registry is captured in both light and dark where the site supports it, and tagged with the theme it was captured in. That makes theme coverage countable across the whole registry.

How many marketing sites actually ship a dark mode?

25 of 189, or 13%. Those 25 sites account for 272 of the registry's 2,429 screenshots, so 11% of all captures are dark. The remaining 164 sites render one way regardless of the visitor's system preference, and 9 of them are explicitly annotated no dark mode by the curator.

Which sites are the 25?

Almost all of them sell to developers. 23 of the 25 fall into the developer-tools or infrastructure categories. Only 2 sit anywhere else in the registry's 18 product categories.

Split by audience, the pattern is not subtle. Among the 84 developer-tools and infrastructure sites, 27% ship a dark mode. Among the other 105 sites in the registry, 2% do.

Why do developer tools ship it and nobody else does?

Because the visitor arrives with a dark editor already open. For a developer-tools company the marketing page sits in the same visual session as the terminal and the IDE, and a white page is a flashbang. The toggle is continuity with the product, not a preference feature.

For a bank, a design tool or a consumer app, none of that holds. The visitor comes from a search result or a link in a message, the page is read once, and a second theme is a second set of imagery, illustrations, screenshots and contrast decisions to maintain for a visit that lasts ninety seconds.

Do the other 164 sites avoid dark entirely?

No, and this is the part agents get backwards. Plenty of light-themed sites use dark heavily, as a section device rather than a theme. A near-black hero, an alternating dark feature band, a dark footer. The registry records these under the site's light capture because the page has one fixed appearance.

1Password's entry describes exactly this: a near-black gradient hero, then feature and testimonial blocks that alternate dark and white full-bleed sections down the page. That is dark used for pacing and emphasis. It is not a theme, and it does not respond to prefers-color-scheme.

So should you build a dark mode?

Pick it from the use scene rather than from habit. Two questions settle most cases:

• Does your visitor arrive from a dark application? If they are coming from an editor, a terminal or a dashboard, the registry says your peers ship a toggle at roughly 27%, and the number rises among the most technical of them.
• Will you maintain two sets of imagery? Every product screenshot, illustration, logo wall and gradient needs a second treatment. 164 sites in the registry decided that cost was not worth it.

If neither points to yes, the alternative is not a flat white page. It is the thing the other 164 do: use dark as a deliberate band inside a light page, where you control the contrast and only maintain one version.

The short version

• 13% of curated marketing sites ship a dark mode.
• 23 of those 25 sites sell to developers.
• Developer tools adopt at 27%, everyone else at 2%.
• Dark as a section band is far more common than dark as a theme.
• An agent adding a toggle by default is following a convention that mostly does not exist.