Domain name valuation comes down to one question: who would pay for this name, and how much? An appraisal tool will give you a number in seconds, but the number I trust comes from a short framework I run on every name: the extension, the length and spelling, the likely buyer, comparable sales, and the demand signals I can see. Here’s how I work through it, in that order.
Start with the extension
The extension sets the ceiling, so I check it first. .com is still the default address for a business. At the end of June 2026, there were 166.6 million .com registrations out of 401.6 million across all extensions, according to Verisign’s quarterly industry brief. That’s more than 4 in 10 domains in a single extension.
Most of my portfolio is .com, and I don’t see that changing. In my view, for most names, the same word in another extension is worth a fraction of the .com, because the business that buys it will always be competing with whoever owns the .com.
Length, spelling, and the radio test
Next, I look at the name itself. All else being equal, shorter is better.
Then I run the radio test: if I said the name out loud, could someone type it without asking how it’s spelled? In my experience, hyphens, numbers, and unusual spellings usually fail that test.
I also ask whether it’s easy to say and easy to remember. I still own exact-match names, where the domain is the keyword people search for, but I no longer keep the long ones. At 16 characters or more, I let them go.
Name the buyer
This is the step that matters most to me. Every name has two prices:
- Investor value is the wholesale price: what another domain investor would pay, knowing they’ll need to resell it at a profit.
- End-user value is the retail price: what a business would pay to actually use the name.
The gap between the two can be large, and it varies too much from name to name for me to give you a ratio. What I do instead is try to name the buyer. If I can picture a type of business that would want this exact name, there’s end-user value. If I can’t, the name is only worth what another investor would pay, and that’s usually not much.
Find comparable sales
Once I know who the buyer is, I look for what similar names actually sold for. These are called comparable sales, or “comps” for short. My first stop is NameBio, a searchable database of reported domain sales.
If you’ve never used it, NameBio is a website that tracks domain name sales. It adds sales every day from marketplaces and auction sites such as GoDaddy, Sedo, Afternic, and DropCatch, so you can look up a keyword and see what names with it have sold for, where, and when. It also publishes a free daily market report of the previous day’s sales of $100 and up. A free account shows 25 results per search. Paid plans add more results, bulk lookups of many names at once, data exports, and alerts when a sale matches a search you’ve saved.
For the high end, DNJournal publishes bi-weekly sales reports and year-to-date charts of the biggest reported sales.
Two cautions. First, many domain sales never make it into NameBio, especially retail sales to businesses, so I treat it as part of the picture, not the whole market. Second, its listings mix investor purchases with retail sales, so a comp is only useful once you know which of the two prices it was: an investor buying to resell, or a business buying to use the name.
Often nothing close to your name has sold. When that happens, I widen the search one step at a time. Say I’m valuing a two-word name like [word]Roofing.com. First I look for other sales that end in “roofing.” If there aren’t enough, I look at two-word .coms from other home-service trades, like [word]Plumbing.com or [word]Electric.com. If that’s still thin, I look at the home-services category as a whole. None of those sales is a perfect match, so I adjust for the differences. If a comp has a stronger first word or a bigger market than my name, I price my name below it.
Look at the demand signals
These are the things I actually weigh when I decide whether a name is worth holding, and what to ask for it:
- Views and offers on Afternic or Sedo. A listing that gets traffic and the odd lowball offer is telling you someone is looking.
- Type-in traffic. People typing the name directly into a browser is a sign it’s a natural address for something.
- Whether the other extensions are taken. If the .net, .org or .co has an active business on it, that business is a ready-made buyer for the .com.
- What advertisers pay for the keyword. A high cost per click in keyword tools means there’s money in that market.
- How long it’s gone without an offer. Years of silence is data too.
- Gut feel. After enough years, some names just feel right or wrong. I don’t let it override the rest, but I don’t ignore it either.
Rule out trademark problems
A name that matches someone’s brand isn’t an asset, it’s a liability. Before I put any value on a name, I search the USPTO Trademark Search system and the Canadian Trademarks Database.
The risk is a complaint under the UDRP, the dispute policy that covers .com and other generic domains. A trademark owner has to show three things: the domain is identical or confusingly similar to their mark, you have no rights or legitimate interests in it, and it was registered and is being used in bad faith. If they win, the panel can order the domain transferred to them or cancelled.
I learned this one the hard way. Years ago, I registered a keyword domain with “Google” in it, and the next morning I had a cease and desist letter from Google in my inbox. I tried it once, never again. It’s not worth the headache.
Trademark conflicts are an instant pass for me, along with hyphens, numbers, and awkward spellings in most cases. I’ll cover the full list of red flags in a separate post.
What automated appraisals are good for
Tools like GoDaddy’s appraisal are worth a look, as long as you know what they’re doing. GoDaddy says its tool combines machine learning with real sales data, and that its estimates are most accurate for common English-language names.
I use appraisals to see which keywords and comparable sales the model is picking up, not for the final number. A model can’t tell you who the buyer is. In my experience, they tend to overvalue long keyword names and undervalue short brandables and acronyms, and two tools will often give the same name very different numbers. When that happens, the spread tells you more than either figure.
One warning: A common scam involves a “buyer” who insists you pay for a third-party appraisal before they’ll make an offer. The appraisal site is often connected to the buyer, who disappears once you pay. Never pay for an appraisal because a buyer asked you to. If they want an appraisal, tell them to pay for it themselves.
The sanity check: holding costs
The last step keeps me honest. Every name costs money to keep. Verisign raised the wholesale price of a .com from $10.26 to $10.97 a year on November 1, 2026, and that’s before your registrar adds its margin.
Meanwhile, most names don’t sell in any given year. Namecheap describes a 1% annual sell-through rate as typical for an investor with a large portfolio. Put those together and the math is simple: hold 100 .coms at, say, $12 a year each and you’re spending $1,200 a year. At a 1% sell-through you’d expect to sell about one name a year, so that one sale has to cover $1,200 in renewals before you’ve made anything.
That’s why my asking prices have to cover the names that don’t sell, and why a name that has sat for years without a single offer is telling me its real value, whatever any appraisal says. It’s also how I decide whether to renew a domain or let it drop.
The framework at a glance
| Step | What to check | What to ask |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Extension | Is it .com? If not, what is the .com doing? |
| 2 | Length and spelling | Short, easy to say, passes the radio test. |
| 3 | Buyer | Can you name a business that would want it? If not, it’s investor value only. |
| 4 | Comps | NameBio and DNJournal, adjusted for the differences and for what kind of sale each one was. |
| 5 | Demand signals | Listing views and offers, type-ins, other extensions in use, cost per click. |
| 6 | Trademarks | Any conflict is an instant pass. |
| 7 | Appraisals | A second opinion on the signals, not the answer. |
| 8 | Holding costs | Does the price make sense once you count the renewals? |
If the name you’re valuing belongs to someone else and you want to make an offer, I covered how to find a domain’s owner in another post.
Top photo: João Silas / Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
Sources
- Verisign: Domain Name Industry Brief, second quarter of 2026, first quarter 2026 results (.com price increase)
- Domain Name Wire: How to get more out of NameBio (July 2026)
- NamePros: NameBio daily sales report, January 28, 2026; Domain name sales reported at NameBio, first six months of 2025
- DNJournal: year-to-date domain sales charts
- USPTO: Search our trademark database; CIPO: Canadian Trademarks Database
- WIPO: Guide to the Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy
- GoDaddy: Domain Name Value and Appraisal
- Spaceship: Domain name valuation tools and techniques
- Google Ads Help: Use Keyword Planner
- Namecheap: The importance of a domain name sell-through rate