Updated October 12, 2026
How the pick lists are built
The short version: we look for dead domains that the internet has not noticed are dead yet. People still type them, click to them and cite them. The lists rank that leftover attention.
The daily scan
Every day we take 1,585,405 .com and .net domains that appear in public popularity and citation datasets, and ask the registry about each one. Nearly all of them are alive and are discarded. What remains falls into three groups:
| Status | What it means | What you can do |
|---|---|---|
| Available | The registry has no record of the domain. It is unregistered. | Register it at any registrar for the normal fee. |
| Dropping | Pending delete. Nobody can renew it; it is released within five days. | Place a backorder, or try to register it the moment it drops. |
| Redemption | Expired, but the old owner can still pay to restore it for about 30 days. | Watch it. If it is not restored it moves to pending delete. |
Domains that are merely suspended by their registrar are still owned, so they are never listed. The “drops by” date shown for a domain is the latest day it can stay in its current stage, counted from the first day we saw it there.
The evidence
| Signal | Source | What it tells you |
|---|---|---|
| Chrome visitors | Chrome UX Report | Real people opened the site in Chrome often enough, within the last few weeks, for Google to include it. It is published as a rank bucket (top 1K … top 1M), not as a visitor count. This is the strongest signal we have. |
| Wikipedia readers | Wikimedia link and pageview dumps | How many English Wikipedia articles still link to the domain, and how many times a day those articles are read. Busy articles keep sending a trickle of readers for years. |
| Rank | Tranco list | A 30-day average of several independent popularity rankings. Still being ranked after expiry means the domain was popular very recently. |
| Referring networks | Majestic Million | How many distinct networks host a link to the domain. Useful for search value, but the easiest signal to fake, so it carries the least weight. |
| Hacker News | HN search | How often the domain’s pages were submitted. A small bonus for tech sites. |
The pick score
The score adds the evidence together, weighting each signal by how hard it is to fake and how directly it reflects human visitors. Chrome usage counts for most, Wikipedia readership next, then rank, then links. Each signal is on a logarithmic scale, so a domain cited by articles with 100,000 daily readers scores higher than one with 1,000, but not a hundred times higher.
To be listed at all, a domain needs at least one sign of human visitors: a place in the Chrome UX Report, or Wikipedia articles citing it that are read at least 100 times a day between them. Links and rankings alone are not enough, because both are routinely manufactured by link farms.
The score is a way to sort a long list. It is not a traffic forecast and it is not a valuation.
What gets filtered out
- Gambling, adult and pharmacy names, and the numbered mirror domains those industries burn through.
- Random-string names and names that are mostly digits.
- Domains deleted before their paid term ended, which usually means they were taken down for abuse.
- Link-farm patterns: names whose only evidence is links from other sites.
- Piracy, essay-mill and payday-loan names.
- Names containing well-known trademarks.
The filters are automatic and imperfect. Some junk gets through and some good names are removed.
What the numbers cannot tell you
Read this before you spend money.
- Nothing here is a visitor count. No public dataset reports the traffic of a dead domain. Every figure is indirect evidence. The only way to know is to register a name and read your own server logs.
- The click estimate is a model. For Wikipedia we assume about 0.3% of an article’s readers follow one of its external links, shared between all the sites linked from that article. Real figures vary several-fold either way, and for most domains the result is a handful of clicks a day or fewer.
- Old traffic fades. Search engines drop a dead site within weeks. Visitors who came for the old content may leave at once if they find something else.
- History matters. A domain may have been used for spam after its original owner left. Always read its archive history before registering. Every pick links to it.
- Trademarks are your responsibility. Registering a name that trades on someone else’s mark can cost you the domain and more.
- Availability moves fast. We check once a day. A good name can be registered by someone else minutes after we list it.
Data sources and credit
This site would not exist without open data. Our thanks to the Chrome UX Report (Google), the Tranco list (Le Pochat et al.), the Majestic Million, Wikimedia dumps and pageview data, and the Hacker News search API. Registration status comes from the registry’s public DNS and RDAP services.