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Somebody did answer this question in January 2023, with a trophy and a press release. Two somebodies, in fact — and they disagreed.
That disagreement is more useful than any list of ten, because it tells you something a ranking never can: that the industry has no single measure of who is at the top, and that its own institutions do not pretend otherwise.
What the record shows for that year
The AVN Awards, held in Las Vegas that January, gave Female Performer of the Year to Kira Noir.
The XBIZ Awards, held in Los Angeles the same month, gave their Female Performer of the Year to Vanna Bardot.
Same category name, same industry, same year, two different women. Neither body made a mistake. They poll different electorates, weight different kinds of work, and set their eligibility windows differently, so they were never obliged to converge — and in 2023 they did not.
There is a coda worth noting. Bardot took the XBIZ award again the following year and added the AVN one, which made the 2024 cycle the point where the two ledgers agreed. So the disagreement was real but not permanent, and reading either year in isolation would have misled you about the other.
The year on the trophy is not the year of the work
This trips up almost every list written in this format, including the one this article replaces.
AVN defines its Female Performer of the Year as recognising the strongest body of work in the previous year, and the ceremony happens each January. The 2023 award is therefore a verdict on 2022 releases.
So an article published in mid-2023 promising the top stars of 2023 was describing a year that was not finished and had not been judged by anyone. The awards that would assess it were still twelve months away, and when they arrived they named someone the article did not have at number one.
What the awards actually measure
Trophies are evidence, but they are evidence of a specific thing, and it is worth being precise about what.
These are trade awards. Work generally has to be submitted, which means a studio or a distributor has to put it forward, which means a performer's presence on the ballot partly reflects who they shot for and how organised that company's awards operation is. Voting runs through industry and press panels rather than the public. Categories are defined by production type — a scene format, a genre line, a showcase release — so a performer's chances depend on whether their year's output happened to fall into shapes the categories recognise.
That is a real and meaningful measure of professional standing within studio production. It is not a measure of who was most watched, most followed, most searched for, or most enjoyed, and it does not claim to be.
The part of the business the trophies no longer reach
Here is the structural problem with any 2023 ranking, and it is the reason this article does not offer one.
By that point a large share of the people working in adult performance were not working primarily for studios at all. They were producing and selling independently through subscription platforms, where there is no distributor to submit anything, no scene in a category, and often no trade press coverage. A performer can be enormously successful in that model and appear in no awards ledger anywhere.
The award record is consequently a complete account of one part of the industry and a blank page for another part — and the second part was the faster-growing one. Any list that ranks performers across both is quietly comparing a documented measure against a nonexistent one, then presenting the result as a countdown.
How to check a list like this yourself
If you encounter a ranked list of performers for any given year, three questions will usually settle whether it is worth your time.
Does it say what it is ranking? Awards, revenue, scene count and personal taste produce entirely different orders, and a list that will not name its criterion is using taste while implying a record.
Does its year match a judged year? If the article was published inside the year it claims to rank, nothing had been judged yet.
Does it cite anything checkable? Award categories, studio release records and filmography databases can all be verified by a reader. Adjectives about screen presence cannot.
The version of this article that stood here previously failed all three. It ranked ten women by appeal, presented the order as though it were established, and supported it with description rather than record — including, for several entries, assertions about their careers and personalities that no source was given for. None of that has been carried forward, because none of it could be checked, and unverified claims about identifiable people are not something to republish for the sake of keeping a countdown intact.
What is left is the part that was actually true: two award bodies, two winners, one year, and a documented reason they did not agree.