Most domain prices sit somewhere on a spectrum from “what someone is willing to pay” to “what comparable sales suggest the market accepts”. The further to the right you sit, the easier it is to defend the number to a finance team or co-founder. Here’s what actually moves the needle, in rough order of weight.
1. Length and pronounceability
Short, easy-to-say names cost more. Five letters or fewer in a .com is a different category from a ten-letter compound. Two-syllable, easy-to-spell-from-hearing names compound the value: glideos.com rings cleaner over a phone call than gld8os.com, even though both have the same character count.
2. The TLD itself
.com still leads. .io and .co are accepted in tech and startup circles but trade at significant discounts to the matching .com for the same root. A useful sanity check: if a buyer would happily pay $X for [name].com, they typically pay 25–40% of $X for [name].io and 15–25% for [name].co. Other newer TLDs (.ai, .app, .dev) are domain-by-domain — .ai in particular has appreciated sharply since 2022 and is approaching parity with .com for AI-product names.
3. Real demand
Search volume for the exact name (or close variants) is a directional signal. Domains that match a real product category, an industry, or an existing English compound carry latent demand: someone is actively going to look for them. A name like ledgernine.com has implicit fintech demand even before you build anything; xqzplats.com doesn’t, no matter how short.
Tools that surface this without a paid subscription:
- Google Trends for relative interest over time
- Google Keyword Planner for rough monthly-search ranges (free with any Google Ads account)
- Ahrefs Keyword Generator free tier — coarse but instant
4. Comparable sales
The single most defensible valuation tool is NameBio. They aggregate public domain sales across Sedo, Afternic, GoDaddy, Dan.com, Sav, and others — searchable by keyword, length, TLD, and date range. Looking at the actual prices that similar names traded at over the last 24 months gives you an honest market range.
A worked example: if you want to gauge productivitysupply.com, search NameBio for two-word .com sales containing “supply”, filtered to the last 24 months. The ones in the $4,000–$15,000 range are your comparable cluster. Median is more useful than mean — outliers (the unicorn $200k sale) skew the average upward and don’t reflect what most buyers will pay.
5. Trademark cleanliness
A name a Fortune-500 trademark holder could plausibly UDRP from you is worth less than the same name with no trademark exposure. USPTO TESS (uspto.gov/trademarks-application-process/search-trademarks) and EUIPO TMview are both free. Search the exact name plus the obvious variants. If you find an active mark in a class your buyer would operate in, the price drops or the deal walks.
What we don’t weight heavily, despite what some sellers claim
- Domain age — only weakly correlates with sale price. Buyers care about how the domain has been used, not when it was first registered. A 20-year-old domain that was a mediocre lead-gen page is worth less than a 4-year-old domain freshly drop-caught by a clean owner.
- Backlink count — same caveat. A high backlink count from low-quality sites is a liability, not an asset; cleaning that link profile is real work.
- DA / DR scores — directionally useful, but Google itself does not use these metrics. They’re a third-party signal of likelihood-to-rank, not the rank itself.
- “Wayback snapshots” — proves a website existed, doesn’t say anything about quality or current value.
When valuations from sellers lean heavily on age + DR + Wayback count, that’s usually because the harder factors (real comps, search volume, trademark status) didn’t help their case.
A simple framework when you’re considering an offer
- Find five comparable sales on NameBio in the last 24 months.
- Take the median sale price.
- Adjust for length differences (shorter = more), TLD differences (
.compremium), and any specific demand signal you can verify. - The result is your honest market range.
If the seller’s asking price sits at or below that range, you’re in fair territory. If it’s well above, you’re paying for the seller’s optimism — sometimes that’s fine (a name you genuinely want for a brand you’ll build), often it’s not.