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Abstract
Web measurements are a well-established methodology for assessing the
security and privacy landscape of the Internet. However, existing top lists of
popular websites commonly used as measurement targets are unlabeled and lack
semantic information about the nature of the sites they include. This
limitation makes targeted measurements challenging, as researchers often need
to rely on ad-hoc techniques to bias their datasets toward specific categories
of interest. In this paper, we investigate the use of Large Language Models
(LLMs) as a means to enable targeted web measurement studies through their
semantic understanding capabilities. Building on prior literature, we identify
key website classification tasks relevant to web measurements and construct
datasets to systematically evaluate the performance of different LLMs on these
tasks. Our results demonstrate that LLMs may achieve strong performance across
multiple classification scenarios. We then conduct LLM-assisted web measurement
studies inspired by prior work and rigorously assess the validity of the
resulting research inferences. Our results demonstrate that LLMs can serve as a
practical tool for analyzing security and privacy trends on the Web.