Domain investors have no shortage of ways to decide whether a domain is good.
Age. Backlinks. Keywords. Extension. Length. Search volume. AI appraisals. Comparable sales.
Dynadot just published its Q2 2026 Domain Intelligence Report using more than 54,000 completed aftermarket sales from its marketplace between April and June. There is a lot of data in the report, but one finding stood out to me more than anything else.
Some of the things we tend to talk about most weren't necessarily the things separating ordinary domains from the expensive ones.
Let's start with price.
The median sale at Dynadot during the quarter was just $18.87. A year earlier it was $18.85.
Almost no change.
In fact, 88.9% of all orders closed below $50.
That number needs some context because Dynadot's data includes expired domain orders, Buy It Now sales, user auctions and backorders. This isn't a report saying the typical retail domain sale is $19. It is a look at everything moving through Dynadot's aftermarket.
Still, it shows just how much activity happens at the bottom of the market.
At the same time, less than 1% of orders selling for $1,000 or more accounted for close to a third of the marketplace's value.
So you basically have two markets happening at once.
A huge amount of low-dollar volume and a tiny number of sales creating a large portion of the money.
That probably doesn't surprise many domain investors.
What surprised me was what the higher-priced names had in common.
Shorter domains certainly performed well at the top. Among sales above $5,000, 57.5% were five characters or shorter. Across all sales, only 14% were that short.
Not one domain selling above $5,000 contained a hyphen.
But here's where it gets more interesting.
Domain age wasn't nearly as important as you might expect.
From one-year-old domains through 20-year-old domains, the median sale price stayed around the overall market median. Domains over 21 years old did receive a modest premium, but age by itself wasn't a particularly strong predictor of what the typical domain sold for.
Backlinks weren't much better.
According to Dynadot's data, a domain with 10,000 backlinks had a median price only about 5% higher than one with 50 backlinks.
Think about how often you see age and backlinks mentioned in sales listings.
Then compare that with the strongest signal Dynadot found.
Cross-TLD registrations.
In simple terms, how many other extensions have the same keyword or string registered?
Across the whole marketplace, the median sold domain was registered in two other extensions.
For domains selling above $5,000, the median was 26.
Names registered in more than 100 extensions sold for nearly twice the typical price.
That makes a lot of sense to me.
If Example.com is registered and nobody has bothered with Example.net, Example.org, Example.io, Example.co or anything else, that tells you something.
If the same word is taken in 50 or 100 extensions, that tells you something too.
It doesn't tell you what the .com is worth.
But it tells you that a lot of other people independently came to the conclusion that the string had value.
That's real-world demand.
Another interesting finding involved keywords.
AI-related terms did not command some huge premium in Dynadot's Q2 data. Domains containing AI keywords had a median of $18.87, exactly the same as the overall market median.
Green energy, agents and bots, and general tech performed somewhat better, but Dynadot's larger conclusion was that structure mattered more than subject matter.
That might be the biggest lesson from the entire report.
We spend a lot of time chasing what's hot.
AI. Crypto. Agents. Robotics. Whatever comes next.
But when Dynadot looked at the domains that actually reached the higher end of its marketplace, they tended to share much more basic characteristics.
They were shorter.
They didn't have hyphens.
And other people wanted the same words badly enough to register them across many different extensions.
None of this means you should buy a domain simply because 50 other extensions are registered.
It doesn't mean age is meaningless either.
There is never going to be one metric that tells us whether a domain is valuable.
But if I were choosing between two names and one was registered in two extensions while the other was registered in 50, I would probably pay a little more attention to that number than I did yesterday.