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The objective of this work is to perform a purely empirical assessment of the actual capabilities of the horizontal-to-vertical (H/V) spectral ratio technique to provide reliable and relevant information concerning site conditions and/or site amplification. This objective has been tackled through the homogeneous (re)processing of a large volume of earthquakes and ambient noise data recorded by different research teams in more than 200 sites located mainly in Europe, but also in the Caribbean and in Tehran. The original recordings were first gathered in a specific database with information on both the sites and recorded events. Then, for all sites close to an instrumented reference, average site-to-reference spectral ratios (“spectral ratio method” (SSR)) were derived in a homogeneous way (window selection, smoothing, signal-to-noise ratio threshold, averaging), as well as H/V ratios (“HVSRE–RF”) on …