Domibot estimates a domain’s value with a fixed set of rules. It reads the name, sets a starting value for its structure, adjusts that value for the extension, hyphens, numbers and age, and then shows a range around the result. Every appraisal shows its arithmetic, so you can see exactly how the number was reached and judge it for yourself. This page explains each rule, the public records Domibot checks, and what the estimate cannot tell you.
Two Values for Every Domain
Each appraisal shows two figures because a domain has two very different kinds of buyer.
End-user value is what a business or person might pay for a name to use as their own website or brand. A company that wants the exact name for its product is the end user, and it is usually the buyer that pays the most.
Investor value is what another domain investor might pay to resell the name later. Investors need room for profit and often hold a name for years before it sells, so their offers are much lower. Domibot sets investor value at 12% of end-user value, or roughly one eighth. Two- and three-letter names and numbers of up to four digits are the exception: they sell quickly between investors, so their investor value is set at 35%.
If you want to sell quickly, investor value is the realistic figure. If you can wait for the right buyer, end-user value is the one to price against.
Step 1: Reading the Name
Domibot first splits the name into words using a word list of about 400,000 entries: English words along with how often each one is used, place names (countries, states, provinces and major cities), and real words in Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, German and Tagalog. It also has its own lists of buying keywords and well-known names from stories, myth and history. A name like perennialplants.com is read as “perennial” and “plants”. Letters that do not form a known word are marked as unknown, which tells the model whether the name is made of real words or is an invented brand. A famous name such as rumpelstiltskin.com is read as one word that most people already know, and a name like kundiman.com is read as a real Tagalog word rather than an invented one.
How common a word is matters. A word everyone uses, like midnight, starts far higher than a rare word that few people would recognize. Search demand matters too: when a single word is searched often and advertisers pay well for those clicks, its starting value is raised to reflect that, even if the word is rare in everyday speech.
The word list also sorts keywords into three tiers:
- High-value keywords, where advertisers pay a lot for each click, such as insurance, loans, lawyer, crypto, hosting and software
- Commercial keywords with steady buyer demand, such as travel, pets, coffee, fitness and garden
- General words with no strong buying market behind them
Domibot also checks the name against a list of well-known brands. If the name is a famous brand, or contains a distinctive one, the appraisal stops and explains why. Domains built on someone else’s trademark can be lost in a dispute and are not sold on the open market, so Domibot does not put a price on them.
Step 2: The Starting Value
The starting value is what the name would be worth as a .com before any other adjustment. It depends on the structure of the name, and each appraisal shows the starting value it used and why.
Short names start highest. Every two- and three-letter .com is registered and they trade often, so they start in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Reported three-letter .com sales from 2022 to 2026 ranged from $75,500 to $1,000,000, with most between $200,000 and $400,000. Well-known acronyms and words, such as USA or CEO, can sell for far more than any formula suggests, so they get low confidence and a suggestion to request a hand appraisal.
Single words come next. Very common English words start in the hundreds of thousands, and the most common can start in the millions, while rare words start in the low thousands. Country, state and major city names start high, famous names start in the tens of thousands, and a real word from another language starts in the thousands. Two- and three-word phrases usually start in the low thousands to low tens of thousands. Invented brandable names start in the hundreds to low thousands, and names that are hard to say or spell start lowest.
Within each group, a high-value or commercial keyword raises the starting value, and longer names start lower than shorter ones.
Step 3: Adjustments
The starting value is then multiplied by a few adjustments.
Extension
Most of the domain resale market is .com, so other extensions are valued as a share of the same name in .com.
| Extension | Share of .com Value |
|---|---|
| .com | 100% |
| .ai | 45% |
| .io | 30% |
| .org | 25% |
| .net | 20% |
| .co | 18% |
| .ca, .uk, .de | 15% |
| .us | 10% |
| Other extensions | 6% |
Hyphens and Numbers
Each hyphen multiplies the value by 0.40, because hyphens are hard to say aloud and easy to forget. A name that mixes numbers and letters is multiplied by 0.50, because people hearing it cannot tell whether “four” is a word or a digit.
Age
An older registration adds a little trust. The value rises 1% for each year since the domain was registered, up to 30%. A domain registered 27 years ago is multiplied by 1.27. Age matters far less than the name itself, which is why the cap is low.
Step 4: The Range
The result of those steps is the midpoint. Domibot shows end-user value as a range from 60% to 160% of the midpoint, and investor value as the same spread around 12% of the midpoint, or 35% for the shortest names. Values are rounded to two significant figures, so $6,096 becomes $6,100.
The range is deliberately wide. Real domain sales depend on who happens to want the name and when, and two similar names can sell for very different prices.
A Worked Example
Here is how perennialplants.com is appraised.
| Step | Detail | Result |
|---|---|---|
| Read the name | Two words: perennial and plants, with a commercial keyword | Two-word phrase |
| Starting value | Two-word phrase with a commercial keyword | $6,000 |
| Length | 15 letters, 5 beyond ten, so 20% off | $4,800 |
| Extension | .com at 100% | $4,800 |
| Age | Registered 1999, 27 years, so +27% | $6,096 |
| Midpoint | Rounded to two significant figures | $6,100 |
| End-user range | 60% to 160% of the midpoint | $3,700 to $9,800 |
| Investor range | The same spread around 12% of the midpoint | $440 to $1,200 |
The Strength Score
Alongside the price, each appraisal gives the name a score out of 100. The score averages six factors, each rated from 0 to 100:
- Length, where shorter names score higher
- Words, where real words score higher than invented ones, counted twice
- Keyword demand, based on the keyword tier, counted one and a half times
- Extension, where .com scores highest
- Clean spelling, which drops for hyphens and mixed numbers
- Age, when a registration date is found
A score of 70 or more is labeled a strong name, 45 to 69 an average name and below 45 a weak name.
Confidence Levels
Each appraisal also shows a confidence level. It does not measure how good the name is. It measures how closely real sales of that type of name tend to follow a formula, which tells you how far a real offer could land from the range.
- High confidence: .com names that trade in a fairly steady price band, such as two-word keyword phrases, four-letter names and four- or five-digit numbers
- Medium confidence: other names made of real words, three-letter names and short numbers, where sales vary more
- Low confidence: invented brands, hard-to-spell names, newer extensions, famous names, place names, words from other languages, very common single words and premium short names, where the price depends on one buyer wanting that exact name
Low confidence does not mean low value. Some of the most valuable names, like two-letter .coms or well-known acronyms, get low confidence because their sales are the hardest to predict.
What Domibot Checks
While the appraisal runs, Domibot looks up five public records and shows what it found:
- Registration: the date the domain was first registered, from public registration records
- Website: whether the domain points to a server, from a public DNS lookup
- Email: whether mail servers are set up for the domain, also from public DNS
- Other extensions: whether the same name is registered in .com, .net, .org, .ai, .io and .co
- Internet Archive: when the Wayback Machine first saved a copy of the site
Only the registration date changes the value, through the age adjustment. The other checks appear in the results as context. A name that is registered in many other extensions, has a live website or has years of history in the Internet Archive is clearly wanted by others, and the appraisal lists that in its favor.
If a lookup service does not answer, the result says the check could not be completed instead of guessing.
What the Estimate Cannot Tell You
An automated appraisal works from the name and a few public records. It does not know:
- What names similar to this one have actually sold for
- How much traffic the domain receives
- Whether the name conflicts with a trademark beyond the list of well-known brands
- Whether a particular buyer needs this exact name right now
Real offers can land well outside the range for any of these reasons. Treat the appraisal as a starting point for your own research, not as a price guarantee. For an important sale, compare it with recent sales of similar names and, if you want a second opinion, request a hand appraisal from the result page.
Your Searches
Appraisals are calculated on our server. We save each appraised domain and its result so the same domain shows the same value every time, and so we can measure our estimates against real sales. We never save anything about who ran the appraisal, and Domibot never registers, buys or backorders names that people search. The Privacy page lists every service that sees the domain you enter.
Data Sources
The word list is built from open data. Word frequencies come from the FrequencyWords project by Hermit Dave, built from OpenSubtitles (CC BY-SA 4.0). The English dictionary check uses the english-words list by dwyl (public domain). City, state and country names come from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0) through the world-cities dataset. Tagalog words come from the Blinkered Tagalog word list (CC0). Monthly searches and click prices are Google Ads figures for the United States, through DataForSEO.
How We Will Improve It
The rules on this page are a starting model based on judgment and experience with domain sales. We plan to tune them against real sales data, add keyword search demand as an input and publish how close our estimates come to actual sale prices. When the model changes, this page will change with it.
These rules were last updated on October 14, 2026, when we raised the starting values for two- and three-letter names to match recent sales, added a much larger word list with place names and words from other languages, tested the rules against several hundred real sales, and added a high confidence level. Saved appraisals keep the version of the rules that produced them, so a result changes only when the rules do.