Top 20 Domain Sales of 2026

The biggest publicly reported domain sale of 2026 so far is NAS.com at $1.25 million. The largest .ai sale ever publicly recorded, Bot.ai at $1.2 million, closed two months before it. The full top 20 sales so far this year add up to more than $7 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 Ahrefs metrics (Domain Rating, active 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 is still dominant at the top, but .ai is no longer playing for second place

Of the 20 sales above, .com accounts for 14, .ai accounts for 5, and .app for the remaining one. That's the headline split, and on its own it sounds like .com is winning by usual margins. But, there are a lot more insights to discover in this data.

The single biggest sale of the year is a .com (NAS.com at $1.25M). The second biggest is a .ai (Bot.ai at $1.2M). The gap between them is $50,000, which is a rounding error at this price level. That has never happened before in publicly reported history. Bot.ai is the first .ai to break the seven-figure ceiling on the record, and it did it within $50K of the biggest .com sale of the same quarter.

Read that as a structural shift, not a one-off. For a founder picking between yourbrand.com and yourbrand.ai, "settle for .ai" is no longer the right framing. .ai is where AI-native companies want to live, and the aftermarket has priced that in.

The other interesting .ai entry is at the bottom. Five separate .ai domains cleared $100K this year (Bot.ai, Speed.ai, Amber.ai, Certify.ai, EVO.ai), and three of them sold the same January week as part of what looks like a coordinated mid-tier sweep. Five .ai six-figure sales in twelve weeks is a market in full development, not a niche TLD.

Domain Rating tells you what the buyer is paying for

Another important column to consider in this list is the Domain Rating. Compare three rows in particular:

• Durable.com: $125,000 at DR 82, with 9,605 referring domains
• Bot.ai: $1,200,000 at DR 13, with 64 referring domains
• NAS.com: $1,250,000 at DR 74, with 4,468 referring domains

Same magnitude of trade in two of those cases. Wildly different underlying calculations.

Durable's buyer paid roughly $1,524 per Domain Rating point. They were not buying a word, they were buying a fully developed SEO asset (and, in this case, Durable the AI website builder migrating from a .co they already operated, which we'll come back to). Bot.ai's buyer paid roughly $92,000 per DR point: almost 100% of the value is the name itself. The link equity will be built. NAS.com sits between them at $16,900 per DR point. Both the word and the equity were in the bag.

None of these are mispriced. They're just different deals. The DR column makes that legible in a way no flat list of prices can. If you're shopping for a name in the aftermarket, this is the column you should be looking at second, right after price.

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

Two of the top 20 are companies upgrading from a non-.com to the matching .com. NAS.io paid $1.25M to become NAS.com. Durable paid $125K to upgrade from Durable.co. Both are companies that built their brand on the cheaper extension 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.

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 between rank 4 and rank 10:

• TXT.com $502,205
• Bar.com $500,000
• Pub.com $500,000
• C4.com $265,000
• PrivateLLM.com $250,000
• Crude.com $200,000
• TII.com $170,000

Three single-syllable English words and three short .coms, plus a multi-word AI .com, all within five months of each other and all between $170K and $500K. That's a tight enough range to read a market floor off.

Bar.com and Pub.com closing at the same $500K on the same day (March 30) 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.

The AI vocabulary is the most active category in the mid-tier

Six of the top 20 sales (30%) are AI-adjacent words:

• Bot.ai ($1.2M)
• PrivateLLM.com ($250K)
• Speed.ai ($165K)
• Amber.ai ($115K)
• Certify.ai ($110K)
• EVO.ai ($100K)

You can stretch the count to seven if you include Durable.com (an AI website builder buying its own brand .com). That's a third of the chart by category, 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: most of these names have backlink profiles that suggest they were not heavily developed before the sale. Bot.ai sold at DR 13 with 64 referring domains. EVO.ai sold at DR 0 with 60. Certify.ai sold at DR 0.1 with 90. PrivateLLM.com sold at DR 3 with 90.

These are names whose entire value is in the word. They were not businesses, they were placeholders. Someone registered them at retail price (a few dollars to a few hundred) and held them. The downside on that bet is 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 most of the top sales went through Sedo

At least four of the top 20 sales (Bot.ai, Midnight.com, C4.com, NAS.com) closed through Sedo's premium brokerage. That includes three of the four largest. When you read about a top-of-market sale in 2026, the odds are very good that a Sedo broker put the deal together.

For buyers, that's useful context. Sedo (along with Afternic, Atom, Sav, DomainAgents, and others) is where the inventory lives. 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:

• Domain Rating (DR) is Ahrefs's overall authority score for a domain, on a 0 to 100 scale. It's calculated from the quantity and quality of referring domains. DR 80+ means the site has been linked to by many well-known sites for many years. DR under 10 typically means the domain hasn't been actively built out, regardless of what was previously there.
• Active backlinks counts every link Ahrefs 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. Durable.com at DR 82 with 9,605 referring domains is a developed asset that has been actively linked-to by a wide audience for years. Bot.ai at DR 13 with 64 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 price floor that's risen visibly inside one quarter. Check out our .ai TLD page for more info on the registration count and aftermarket trend data.
2. Read the DR 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 at different scales.
4. The short-generic-.com floor is not coming down. If you're holding out for Bar.com or Crude.com to drop in price, the data says you'll be holding for a while. Branchable 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 (Domain Rating, active backlinks, referring domains) come from Ahrefs, refreshed against the live API each time we update the page. When a row shows a higher DR than the buyer would have seen at the time of sale, that's because the new owner has started developing the name. NAS.com is the clearest example: referring domains rose from roughly 3,081 in early May to 4,468 by mid-May as Nas Daily redirected and consolidated.

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?

NAS.com sold for $1,250,000 in mid-April 2026, making it the largest publicly reported domain sale of the year so far. The buyer is Nuseir Yassin, founder of the Nas Daily media brand. NAS.io now redirects to NAS.com and the company has incorporated the .com into its updated logo.

What is the most expensive .ai domain ever sold?

Bot.ai cleared $1,200,000 on Sedo in February 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 .ai ceiling 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?

Most of the top-of-market sales above closed through brokerages and marketplaces like Sedo, Afternic, Atom, Sav, and DomainAgents. Instant Domain Search aggregates listings across all of them 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.

Why are the Domain Rating numbers different from the original sale reports?

DR is a live metric. We refresh it against the Ahrefs API on each update of this page. When a buyer starts developing a domain (redirecting an existing brand, building new content, attracting press coverage), DR moves. The "DR at time of sale" was almost always lower for the names in this list than the DR you see today. NAS.com is the most visible example of this so far in 2026.

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 busier than most observers expected. Three seven-figure sales in one quarter, the first publicly reported seven-figure .ai ever, two visible brand-migration trades, and a tight cluster of single-word .coms holding above 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.