Insights on Internet domains, DNS intelligence, and dataset research.
Stripe has closed the DomainsProject account. No further payments will be processed through it, the customer billing portal is no longer available, and any refunds Stripe is able to issue will be issued by Stripe directly. Dataset access and delivery are unaffected; paid tiers are now arranged by email.
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. For SOC teams, brand-protection researchers, and threat-intelligence analysts.
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.
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.
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.
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 25.5% of all website records — 73.6 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. GoDaddy front doors hold three-quarters of the lot. For measurement researchers, registrars, security teams, and anyone who counts 'websites'.
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 doubled to 24.8% of all site records. For hosting strategists, registrars, measurement researchers, and anyone who thinks the cloud wars are moving the web.
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.
We followed every one of the 181.1 million domains that resolved in April 2023 across 26 DNS snapshots to June 2026, and did the same for a 246.8-million-domain 2025 cohort. The resolving web loses 13-15% of itself every year — a half-life of roughly five years — but the deaths are wildly unequal: Freenom's five TLDs went 99% extinct in the largest die-off ever recorded in the DNS, the cheap-promo gTLDs lose up to 95% of their web in three years, and Germany's .de keeps 84% alive. For registrars, investors, security teams, and anyone who links to anything.
The first edition of the Internet Concentration Index: a synthesis of four full-corpus, typed-DNS censuses of the same ~3-billion-name dataset, measuring who controls the Internet's core layers one domain at a time. DNS, email, cloud hosting and the CDN/proxy edge each have a different owner — GoDaddy, Google, Amazon and Cloudflare — no single company controls all four, the enterprise giant everyone names (Microsoft) is nearly invisible by domain count, and 92.5% of delegated domains sit on a single point of failure. For policymakers, security teams, and anyone who has watched one outage take down half the web.