This paper makes a range of comparisons between egovernment developments and performance worldwide. In order to make such comparisons, it is necessary to use a set of indicators. This paper examines the evolution of indicators used by three widely referenced international e-government studies, from the early days of e-government benchmarking until today. Some critical remarks related to the current state-of-the-art are given. The authors conclude that all three studies have their strengths and weaknesses, and propose automatic assessment of e-government services as a potential solution to some of the problems experienced by current benchmarking studies.