The "Seventh Annual State and Federal E-Government Study" performed by the researchers at Brown University has concluded that FirstGov Portal is the top federal Website in the United States. The runner up in the Brown ranking is the Department of Agriculture site. The two have amounted ratings of 84 and 80 out of 100 points.

The Brown University research team, led by Darrell M. West, director of the Taubman Center for Public Policy analyzed and centralized data from 1,564 state and federal sites, out of which 1,503 were state sites, 48 belonged to the federal government and 13 to federal courts. The research focused exclusively on June and July 2006.

West even emitted a set of pieces of advice, following the evaluation in the press release: "One area where improvement is needed is consistency in design, navigation and appearance among the various websites. Many state websites have inconsistent layouts and color schemes, with pages that look very different as users browse from agency site to agency site or even within a single agency site itself. This can be intimidating and overwhelming as users sometimes are not sure if they still are on an official website when and users have to orient themselves for every new website."