September 28, 2026
27 min read
.xyz accounted for 98% of the domain market's net growth in August 2026, and nobody said why. Our Newly Observed Hostnames feed saw 3.27 million new .xyz names between June and September, 2.7 million more than the spring pace. In our September sample, 84% came through one Japanese registrar, and almost all of those went straight to Afternic, GoDaddy's domain marketplace. They were generated by gluing a keyword such as gpu, taxi or manga to dictionary words. The same pattern ran in 2025, and the August 2025 batch was 88% deleted a year later. Two in three resolving .xyz names now point at an Afternic for-sale page. The flood also blunts a common security signal: in every wave month, a new .xyz name was less likely than a new name elsewhere to be reported for phishing. For registries, registrars, domain investors, security teams and anyone who uses domain counts as a signal.
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 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 10, 2026
20 min read
26 monthly DNS snapshots, April 2023 to June 2026: domains pointing at parking, for-sale, expiry and registrar-default landers grew from 16.0% to a peak of 26.9% of all website records in January–February 2026 — 73.4 million domains — then began the first sustained decline on record, in the exact quarter Google switched off the parking ad economy and Bodis shut down. Corrected September 23, 2026. GoDaddy front doors hold three-quarters of the lot. For measurement researchers, registrars, security teams, and anyone who counts 'websites'.
July 06, 2026
23 min read
We compared the website address of every domain that resolved in both April 2023 and June 2026 — 110.6 million survivors — and classified both endpoints by BGP network. 46.8% answer from the exact same IP three years later; 67.7% never left their provider. The biggest migration wasn't chosen by any webmaster: GoDaddy moved its 10-million-domain lander estate from Google Cloud to AWS anycast, and the parked web grew to 26.1% of all site records. Corrected September 23, 2026. For hosting strategists, registrars, measurement researchers, and anyone who thinks the cloud wars are moving the web.