Sustainability of the European livestock sector needs indicators to be measured. Over the last decades, several studies defined sustainability indicators covering the three different pillars of sustainability, namely the environmental (ENV), economic (ECO) and social (SOC) pillar. However, due to an increasing number and diversity of defined indicators, it is possible to speak about an “indicator explosion” and the development of indicators was not balanced over the three pillars. By means of a systematic literature review, we aimed at studying the quantity and diversity of indicators used in each pillar and for different livestock systems defined in the last decades. We started from a search result and, after a systematic screening, we selected 44 studies that defined and measured sustainability indicators in Europe at the farm scale. Indicators used in these studies were harmonized (in case they named differently but describing the same thing) and classified into pillars and themes (sub-pillars). They were counted as total (T) or unique (U) (according to weather the same indicator, used in different studies, was counted multiple times or once), quantitative or qualitative. Out of a total of 736 indicators, most were used in ENV (n=282), followed by SOC (n=271) and ECO (n=183). ENV showed a low diversity of indicators used (U/T = 0.52), with the most representing themes being emissions, nutrient balance, and non-renewable resources; ECO showed greater diversity of indicators used (U/T=0.64) but the great majority (65.5%) of them regarded profitability and were mostly quantitative (94%). SOC showed the higher diversity of indicators (U/T=0.72), most of them in the animal welfare theme, with the highest percentage among the pillars of qualitative indicators (50%). The review showed that most indicators (38.9%) were used for dairy cattle systems. This study enhanced that more efforts should be used to expand the study of indicators of positive impacts of the livestock system and to make the social indicators more uniformly assessed