How it works

A domain's rank comes from first-party demand: visits to its profile page, recorded by our own servers. Nothing else creates a rank.

Two things are never ranking inputs:

• Asking prices or any other owner-supplied number. Otherwise the list just ranks whoever typed the biggest figure.
• Owner-side analytics such as GA4. The owner instruments their own site, so the numbers can be botted in an afternoon. Search Console is the one exception, and it is bounded. See below.
• Public-record signals about the domain: whether it serves a live site, whether it has mail servers, how long the web archive has seen it. They tell a buyer a lot and we show them, but a domain does not climb because it has a website.

One thing does shade the order, within a hard limit: Google Search Console, if the owner connects it. It is different from GA4 in the way that matters: Google measures the domain, the owner does not instrument it. So forging it means buying real clicks through real search, past Google's own filtering.

It is capped at +25% and it is a multiplier, not demand. A domain nobody opens here scores zero no matter how much search traffic it has. The cap is there for a second reason as well: only owners who connect it have it, so an unbounded bonus would rank whoever linked an account rather than which domains people want. Not connecting costs at most that 25%, and connecting with no clicks costs nothing.

Only domains with a proven owner: Verified means the owner published a DNS TXT record carrying a token we issued, the same mechanism Google Search Console uses. Nobody but the domain's controller can do that, so it needs no manual review and cannot be faked. Unverified listings are excluded from the leaderboard entirely and clearly de-emphasized in the catalog.

Being for sale is a separate question. A domain whose owner is not selling still ranks, marked not for sale where its price would be, because demand for it is a real fact. The board has a filter for anyone who only wants what they can buy, and the catalog only ever lists domains that are for sale.

Whoever proves DNS control today. A domain has one public profile forever, and that profile carries the domain's history: its measured visits, registry facts and any past sale. The account holding it is whoever last published a verification token.

So a buyer who just took over a domain claims it and relists it, and an owner who finds their domain listed by a stranger takes it back the same way. The claim token is issued to the claimant alone, so an existing record can never satisfy somebody else's claim, and the previous holder is emailed the moment a claim succeeds.

A view registers only from a real browser executing our script, so crawlers that don't run JavaScript never count. On top of that we drop:

• known bot, headless and tooling user-agents (kept in the log, flagged, excluded from all counts);
• browsers that report themselves as automated, or report no real viewport;
• bursts from one address: more than 20 views a minute is a script, not a reader;
• the owner's own visits to their domain. They still show in the live counter on the front page, which is about who is on the site right now rather than what any one domain is worth;
• repeat hits from the same visitor within 30 seconds;
• duplicate visits within a day. Ranking counts unique daily visitors, not raw hits.

What we do not do yet: filter by datacenter IP ranges, which needs an IP intelligence database. It is on the list, and until it ships we do not claim it.

Privacy: we store only salted hashes of IP and user-agent, and the salt rotates daily, so visitors can't be tracked across days. Location is country-level only.

Inquiries follow the same logic. Only signed-in accounts with a verified email can send one, a buyer can open exactly one inquiry per domain, and the seller's response rate and reply time come from replies sent through us. A seller who answers privately by email looks slower here than they were, which is why the label always says what was measured.

score = ln(1 + demand) x reputation x search

demand     = sum(unique daily visitors x decay) + inquiries x 5
decay      = 0.5 ^ (days ago / 7)      a view's weight halves weekly
window     = last 30 days
reputation = 1 + min(0.15, 0.03 x ln(1 + seller's verified domains))
search     = 1 + min(0.25, 0.04 x ln(1 + Search Console clicks))
             1 when not connected, or when the reading is over 45 days old

The log keeps one viral day from freezing the list. The decay keeps it current. Both multipliers are deliberately small, and both sit outside the logarithm on purpose: everything inside it is measured by us, so nothing else can create a rank, only shade one that demand already earned.

An inquiry counts like 5 visitors, and only one inquiry per buyer per domain ever counts. Reputation comes only from the seller's count of ownership-verified domains.

We are never in the transaction: we never hold funds, 0%. The money is between buyer and seller, so a reported sale price is always an owner claim. The transfer is different: we snapshot the registry record when a sale is reported and check it daily, and when the registrar or nameservers change hands the sale becomes a verified transfer with a date.

Reviews are locked behind that: only the sale's named buyer, only if they actually contacted the seller here, and only after the registry confirmed the transfer. No purchase, no review, so a seller cannot farm ratings.

Every figure on proven.domains carries one of these labels:

• measured by proven.domains: our servers, our logs. The only thing that creates a rank.
• public record: registries (RDAP), archives, trademark offices. Objective, not ours.
• their analytics reports: the owner's connected accounts, attributed per provider, never summed together. Search Console is the only one that touches the ranking, capped as described above.
• owner claim: including every asking price. Unverified by definition.

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