September 23, 2026
34 min read
Data centers are fighting over power, and Northern Virginia is the prize. We located every address behind the website record of every registrable domain in 29 crawls, April 2023 to September 2026 — by cloud region tag, geofeed, geoIP and 213 speed-of-light RTT measurements — and mapped it to a metro and a grid operator. Northern Virginia serves 3.6% of the world's websites, more than any country except the United States and Germany, and one in five of those we can place in the US. Its share has not grown: it fell for live sites, while its biggest tenant became a domain-for-sale marketplace. The fastest-growing place on the map is no place: 47% of websites now answer from anycast and CDN front doors, up from 31%. For energy and policy reporters, utility and grid analysts, cloud-resilience engineers and Internet measurement researchers.
September 22, 2026
35 min read
We counted every IPv4 address behind the website record of every registrable domain in 29 full crawls of the DomainsProject corpus, April 2023 to September 2026. The web grew 71% (169.3M to 289.7M websites); the addresses it answers from grew 16% (10.9M to 12.7M). Half of all websites now answer from just 1,025 addresses, down from 3,908, and two GoDaddy addresses alone serve 23.9 million. But the concentration at the top is the parking layer: the live web still needs ~17,700 addresses to reach half its sites, while its middle is thinning — its dedicated-address share fell by a quarter and half the live web now sits on 11 networks, not 20. The annual physical-layer companion to the Internet Concentration Index, for network operators, courts and regulators weighing IP blocking, privacy engineers, and Internet measurement researchers.
September 05, 2026
31 min read
We kept the exact TTL of every A record in 28 full crawls of the DomainsProject corpus, April 2023 to August 2026 — 43.6 billion DNS answers, 6.9 billion of them the address record of a registrable domain. The share of domains whose address expires in five minutes or less rose from 21.27% to 28.67%, and among live (non-parked) sites from 23.00% to 36.38%, almost all of it since March 2025, while the share at a day or more did not grow. Corrected September 23, 2026. But 60.8% of surviving domains publish the same value 40 months later: GoDaddy's domaincontrol.com (mode 600) and Cloudflare (mode 300, 89% of its zones) set the number for a third of the web, and Cloudflare alone accounts for 47% of every domain at five minutes or less. For DNS and platform operators, SRE and incident-response teams, and Internet measurement researchers.
August 20, 2026
39 min read
We followed the MX record of every apex domain across eleven full crawls, April 2025 - August 2026 (421.9 million apexes). 70.8% of mail-capable domains sit on the bit-identical MX record set sixteen months later; provider switching runs under 1% a month. Google Workspace's lead over Microsoft 365 widened at every single pass (1.28 to 1.43 by domain count) - yet direct switching between the two is a wash; the gap is made by new domains, which arrive 2.3-to-1 for Google, while Microsoft wins the migrations out of self-hosting. Null MX quadrupled from 3.4M to 13.4M domains, and 77% of it is one aftermarket platform's zone template. For email and security teams, hosting providers, and Internet measurement researchers.
July 24, 2026
31 min read
We mapped a week of Google Trends spikes (US + Canada) against our Newly Observed Hostnames feed. A brand-new AI model was followed by a clean launch-day lookalike wave; a breach at a household-name AI company saw no measurable wave at all; and a two-hour Instagram outage saw none either — its phishing lives on free-hosting subdomains a registration feed never sees. Of 195 event-matched lookalikes, 94% resolve but only 30% are provisioned for email. Corrected September 27, 2026. For SOC teams, brand-protection researchers, and threat-intelligence analysts.
July 23, 2026
22 min read
We followed the NS delegation of every apex domain across nine full crawls, April 2025 - July 2026 (404 million apexes). 61% of the web kept the exact same nameservers for fifteen months; operator switching runs at 2.3% a month; and the biggest moves were corporate re-plumbs - GoDaddy consolidating 2.1 million NameFind domains onto Afternic, Namecheap shifting 1.1 million parked names to an undocumented platform in one month. Meanwhile 339,000 domains still delegate to the retired Dan.com. For DNS operators, security teams, and Internet measurement researchers.
July 18, 2026
21 min read
We re-classified 18 billion DNS TXT queries across ten full crawls (April 2025 - July 2026) and turned the SaaS verification-token census into a time series. Anthropic tokens grew 625x to 131,812 apexes. The Dan.com shutdown moved five million marketplace tokens. Microsoft 365's domain share is flat while Google's climbs. And across every major vendor, only 19-29% of token disappearances are deliberate cleanup - the rest is domain death. For SaaS analysts, security teams, and Internet measurement researchers.
July 11, 2026
17 min read
Two CNAME-typed crawls of 1.9 billion hostnames, 32 days apart: 169 million cross-domain aliases followed by name. 7.5% of the alias layer rewires or disappears in one month, parking lost 1.54M aliases, one Chinese registrar generated 13% of all new aliases — and the three biggest 'migrations' were platforms re-pointing their own chains, dragging half a million customer domains along. For DNS operators, measurement researchers, and anyone who builds on someone else's CNAME.
July 03, 2026
20 min read
We logged 1,348,706 requests across two production web properties for 174 days and classified every user-agent. AI crawlers now generate 7.2% of all observed traffic — more than Googlebot, Bingbot, DuckDuckBot, Baiduspider, and PetalBot combined. OpenAI alone accounts for 38% of the AI crawl, 69% of AI requests still feed training pipelines, and a robots.txt honeypot shows 99% of AI-crawler violations trace to a single bot. For publishers, infrastructure teams, and anyone deciding what to do about the new tenants of the crawl economy.
June 23, 2026
18 min read
We pointed an NS-typed crawl at 301 million registry domains to ask who actually answers the first question of every web request. 277.6 million are delegated, and the answer is concentrated: registrar-bundled DNS runs nearly half the delegated web, GoDaddy leads at 18.9% as the default nobody chose, and Cloudflare follows at 13.9% as the operator everybody migrates to — more than every hyperscaler cloud combined. Beneath the leaderboard sits a quieter finding: 92.5% of delegated domains depend on a single DNS organization with no independent backup. Built from 151 million-plus apex NS records.