Tim Berners-Lee asked organizations to appoint someone responsible for their website in 1992.
In 1992, Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, published a style guide recommending that every organization hosting a website designate a "webmaster" as the point of contact for site maintenance and correspondence.1 The term appeared in Berners-Lee's early documentation at CERN, where the web had been created in 1989 to help physicists share research documents across networks.
By 1993, as websites began appearing outside academic institutions, "webmaster" became a formal job title. The role combined technical skills in HTML, server administration, and content management with the communication duties of answering user emails sent to the standard webmaster@ address. Early webmasters were often the only person at an organization who understood how the web worked.2
The title peaked in prevalence during the late 1990s, when commercial websites were expanding rapidly and organizations needed a single person who could build, maintain, and troubleshoot their online presence. Job postings for "webmaster" reached their highest volume around 1997-2000.3
As the web matured, the role splintered into specialized functions. Web developers handled code, UX designers handled interface and interaction, content managers handled publishing, and system administrators handled servers. Google's Webmaster Central, launched in 2006, was renamed Google Search Console in 2015.4 The job title that once described the single person who ran a website became obsolete precisely because websites became too complex for one person to run.