Top 20 Domain Sales of 2026

The biggest publicly reported domain sale of 2026 is AI.com at $70,000,000, the largest domain sale ever publicly recorded. It more than doubles the prior record, Voice.com at $30 million in 2019. The reported buyer is Kris Marszalek, CEO of Crypto.com. Bot.ai at $1.2 million is still the largest publicly recorded .ai sale, though it now sits at #5 overall. The full top 20 sales so far this year add up to more than $98 million in verified transactions. Yet many people outside the domain industry don't know how to use this information to their advantage.

Below is the live, sortable list of the 20 highest publicly reported domain sales of 2026, with current Semrush metrics (Authority Score, backlinks, referring domains) attached to every row. We rebuild this tracker as new sales get verified by DNJournal and NameBio, so the chart you see today will look very different by December.

You can use it three ways. If you're naming a company, it's a market floor: it tells you what other people are paying for short, generic, or category-defining names right now. If you already own a name, it's a comparable: you can read your asset against names in a similar shape and class. If you're just curious about where money is moving on the internet, this is one of the cleaner reads available.

What this data actually tells us

One huge sale is just a headline. But twenty of them side by side reveal the patterns of which TLDs are gaining ground, what kinds of names buyers are paying for, and where the money is actually moving.

.com owns the top of the market, and .ai holds a quarter of the chart

Of the 20 sales above, .com accounts for 15 and .ai accounts for the other 5. That's the headline split, and this year the top end backs it up emphatically: the four biggest sales of 2026 (AI.com at $70M, Club.com at $10M, Green.com at $7.5M, NAS.com at $1.25M) are all .coms, and the biggest domain sale ever publicly recorded is a .com.

Bot.ai is still the largest publicly recorded .ai sale and the first .ai to break the seven-figure ceiling. But it now sits at #5 overall, well behind the mega .com deals. Read .ai as a strong, clear second: it holds five of the twenty slots this year and its ceiling keeps rising, but when the really big money moves, it moves to .com.

For a founder picking between yourbrand.com and yourbrand.ai, the practical read hasn't changed. .ai is where AI-native companies want to live, and the aftermarket has priced that in. The .com is still the asset the market treats as the trophy.

Authority Score tells you what the buyer is paying for

The column to read second, right after price, is Semrush Authority Score. Compare three rows in particular:

• AI.com: $70,000,000 at Authority Score 40, with 3,270 referring domains
• NAS.com: $1,250,000 at Authority Score 34, with 3,296 referring domains
• Bot.ai: $1,200,000 at Authority Score 2, with 117 referring domains

NAS.com and Bot.ai traded within $50,000 of each other. The underlying purchases could not be more different. NAS.com came with a developed old brand's link profile: thousands of unique sites already pointing at it. Bot.ai came with almost nothing. Its buyer paid seven figures almost entirely for the word itself; the link equity will be built after the fact.

AI.com is the extreme case in the other direction: the highest authority on the chart and a price no SEO metric explains. Nobody pays $70 million for backlinks. They pay it for the two most valuable letters of the decade.

None of these are mispriced. They're just different deals. The Authority Score column makes that legible in a way no flat list of prices can.

The "brand migration" pattern is back, and it's not just for billionaires

Two of the top 20 are companies upgrading to the exact-match .com of a brand they already operate. NAS.io paid $1.25M to become NAS.com. GoHighLevel, the marketing SaaS platform, paid $1M for HighLevel.com in a private sale that only surfaced through financial filings. Both are companies that built their brand on a longer or cheaper name first, ran the business long enough to know the brand was sticking, and then bought the .com as a maturity signal.

The Nuseir Yassin quote on the NAS.com deal was that he spent ten years saving to afford it. That is a real datapoint about what end-user operators actually believe about long-term .com authority versus the cheaper near-equivalents.

A third example sits just outside this year's top 20: Durable, the AI website builder, paid $125K to upgrade from Durable.co to Durable.com.

The lesson for younger companies is not that you should hold out for the .com from day one. The lesson is that if your brand starts working, the .com upgrade is a line item your future self will probably budget for. Plan accordingly.

Single-word .com floors are holding

Look at the cluster in the middle of the chart:

• TXT.com $502,250
• 420.com $500,000
• Bar.com $500,000
• Pub.com $500,000
• C4.com $265,000

The half-million line is now a three-way tie: 420.com, Bar.com, and Pub.com all closed at exactly $500,000, with TXT.com sitting just above at $502,250. Bar.com and Pub.com were reported in the same week through the same brokerage, Defining.com, which suggests buyer-side pressure on this shape of name, not seller-side eagerness.

Generic single-word .coms are not getting cheaper. They were not cheap five years ago, they were not cheap two years ago, and they're not cheap now. If anything, the floor under them keeps inching up. Green.com clearing $7.5 million this spring is the same story at a bigger scale: a single dictionary word with obvious category value.

The AI vocabulary is the most active category

The single biggest sale of the year is literally AI.com. Beneath it, five .ai names hold top-20 slots:

• Bot.ai ($1.2M)
• Genesis.ai ($400K)
• Lotus.ai ($400K)
• Free.ai ($350K)
• Neo.ai ($275K)

That's a quarter of the chart in one TLD, and it's matched by the structural reality that almost every newly funded startup name we see on Instant Domain Search right now skews AI-native.

If you're naming an AI company in 2026, the obvious single-word .com is either gone or expensive, and the matching .ai is starting to clear six and seven figures too. The window for picking up a category-defining AI word for $20–$30K closed about eighteen months ago.

Hand-registered upside is bounded but real

There's a quiet line item in this list that's worth pulling out: several of these names have backlink profiles that suggest they were not heavily developed before the sale. Goka.com sold for $399,995 at Authority Score 2 with 102 referring domains. Bot.ai sold for $1.2 million at Authority Score 2 with 117. Derm.com sold for $825,000 at Authority Score 4 with 158.

These are names whose entire value is in the word. Nothing was built on them; no meaningful SEO equity changed hands. For the names that started as hand registrations, the downside on that bet was bounded at the registration fee. The upside, occasionally, is six or seven figures.

This is not investment advice. It is just a reminder that the cost of trying (registering a good available name today and holding it) is still functionally zero in 2026. You can browse curated lists of available names refreshed daily against live registry data, or search 800+ TLDs directly. The market clearly still pays for the right word.

The aftermarket is liquid, and no single venue owns the top of it

Where these sales closed is its own datapoint. Sedo brokered three of the current top 20 (Bot.ai, Midnight.com, C4.com), but none of the top four: AI.com closed via GetYourDomain.com and DomainAssets, Club.com via Hilco Digital, Green.com via ATM Holdings, and NAS.com via Lumis. In the mid-tier, Atom.com shows up most often (Genesis.ai, Free.ai, Neo.ai).

The takeaway for buyers is that the inventory is scattered. Sedo, Afternic, Atom, Sav, DomainAgents, and a long tail of independent brokers all hold pieces of it. Instant Domain Search aggregates listings across all of them at once, so you can search the aftermarket in one place rather than opening five separate marketplace tabs. You can also watch expiring and recently dropped domains if you'd rather catch a name on its way back to availability than negotiate with a current owner.

How to read the metrics on each row

A quick primer on the SEO columns, since they do a lot of the analytical work in this tracker:

• Authority Score (AS) is Semrush's overall authority metric for a domain, on a 0 to 100 scale. It's calculated from backlink signals, referring domains, and organic traffic. A high score means the domain has earned links from many well-known sites and attracts real search traffic. A score in the low single digits typically means the domain hasn't been actively built out, regardless of what was previously there.
• Backlinks counts every link Semrush currently sees pointing at the domain, across all referring pages. A high backlink count with a low referring-domain count means the links are concentrated on a few sources (often a single site repeatedly).
• Referring domains counts the unique domains linking to the target. This is usually the more meaningful number. A buyer evaluating an asset for SEO equity should look at referring domains before backlinks.

The combination tells the story. AI.com at Authority Score 40 with 3,270 referring domains is a developed asset with years of accumulated links behind it. Goka.com at Authority Score 2 with 102 referring domains is a fresh slate that the buyer will need to build on.

What this means if you're naming something in 2026

A few practical takeaways:

1. Don't dismiss .ai as the cheap alternative anymore. It's an actively traded TLD with publicly reported sales above seven figures and a quarter of this year's top-20 slots. Check out our .ai TLD page for more info on the registration count and aftermarket trend data.
2. Read the Authority Score before you offer. If a name has been built up over a decade, you're paying for that. If the metrics suggest it's a parked or placeholder name, you're paying purely for the word. Both can be rational. Mixing them up is how people overpay.
3. Plan for the upgrade path. If you're starting on a non-.com because the .com is taken or unaffordable, accept that the .com is something you may want to acquire later. Two of the top 20 sales this year are exactly that move.
4. The short-generic-.com floor is not coming down. If you're holding out for Bar.com or Pub.com to drop in price, the data says you'll be holding for a while. Brandable invented words are still where most buyers eventually settle.
5. The aftermarket is where these names live. All 20 sales above were brokered, listed, or auctioned. You can browse the aggregated aftermarket inventory from every major marketplace in one place on Instant Domain Search, or check on recently expired and dropping names if you'd rather catch supply at the inflection.

Methodology

Prices and dates are sourced from DNJournal weekly reports, NameBio, and individual verified sale reports. Many large transactions are sealed under non-disclosure agreements and never enter the public record, so this list reflects publicly reported sales only. The actual top of the market in 2026 is almost certainly higher than what you see here.

SEO metrics (Authority Score, backlinks, referring domains) come from Semrush, refreshed on each update of this page. When a row shows a higher Authority Score than the buyer would have seen at the time of sale, that's because the new owner has started developing the name (redirecting an existing brand, building new content, attracting press coverage).

Sale dates reflect the publication window of the verifying report when an exact close date is not disclosed. Some marketplace transactions show up in DNJournal as a date range rather than a single day.

We rebuild this list across the year as new sales are verified. Bookmark the page and check back, or sign up for product updates if you want a heads-up when a new sale clears the top of the chart.

Frequently asked questions

What is the biggest domain sale of 2026?

AI.com sold for $70,000,000, publicly reported in February 2026. It is the largest domain sale of the year and the largest publicly recorded domain sale ever, more than doubling the previous record (Voice.com at $30 million in 2019). The reported buyer is Kris Marszalek, CEO of Crypto.com.

What is the most expensive .ai domain ever sold?

Bot.ai cleared $1,200,000 on Sedo in early 2026, the first publicly reported seven-figure .ai sale on record. It beat the previous .ai record by roughly 60% in the span of five months. As .ai registrations crossed 1 million earlier this year, that ceiling is now set higher than most observers expected. Our popular domain extensions tracker covers the .ai growth curve in more detail.

Are domain prices going up in 2026?

For the kinds of names in the table above (short single-word .coms, category-defining .ais, established brandables) yes, visibly. The single-word .com floor is steady or rising, and the record for the biggest sale ever has just been redrawn. For longer or weaker names, the market is largely unchanged. The headline trend masks a more nuanced reality, which is roughly what you would expect of any aftermarket: scarcity holds price, abundance does not.

Where are these sales actually happening?

The top-of-market sales above closed through a mix of brokerages and marketplaces: Sedo, Atom.com, Hilco Digital, and a long tail of independent brokers. Instant Domain Search aggregates listings across the major marketplaces so you can see what's available in one feed rather than checking five different sites. If you'd rather watch for names dropping back to availability, the expired and expiring domains feed catches that pipeline.

How are these sales verified?

Aftermarket sales reports come primarily from DNJournal (which has tracked the industry since 2003) and NameBio. Each weekly report is compiled from marketplace data, broker disclosures, and direct seller reports. Sales under NDA are not included. The numbers in this tracker have been cross-checked against both sources where available.

Should I buy a domain in the aftermarket or hand-register a new one?

Both can be rational. Aftermarket gets you a developed asset, an existing word, or both, at a price that reflects scarcity. Hand-registration gets you nothing of value beyond the word itself, at a cost of $10–$30. The data above shows that hand-registered names can still clear six figures in the right category. Our guide to buying and selling domains covers the trade-offs.

How often do you update this tracker?

The plan is monthly, faster when a notable sale hits. The metrics refresh tied to each update means the SEO data on the page is always within a few weeks of current. Last refresh date is shown directly under the table.

Bottom line

The 2026 top of the market is bigger than anyone predicted. Seven sales at or above $1 million (AI.com, Club.com, Green.com, NAS.com, Bot.ai, Midnight.com, HighLevel.com), led by the largest domain sale ever publicly recorded. A $70 million .com at the top, the first seven-figure .ai on the books, two visible brand-migration trades, and a three-way tie of single-word .coms holding the half-million line.

If you're naming something, search the available inventory across 800+ extensions before you fall in love with a 14-character invented word. If you already own a good name, the table above is a reasonable comparable. And if you're shopping the aftermarket, you can search every major marketplace at once on Instant Domain Search, or watch the expiring and dropping names feed for the names heading back to availability.

For the other half of the picture (what every TLD is doing in registration volume and growth rates, not just resale prices), see our most popular domain extensions in 2026 tracker. For where to actually buy once you've picked a name, our best domain registrars in 2026 post covers the trade-offs.

The data above will keep moving. We'll keep updating it.