Most appraisal tools return a number and no reasoning. This page documents the entire model behind ours — what it measures, what it multiplies, where the floors sit, how the confidence score is produced, and, just as importantly, what it cannot know.
There are two very different questions people mean by "what is this domain worth".
What an end-user buyer — a funded company that wants this exact name — would pay through a broker or marketplace. This is the primary range we publish.
What another investor would pay at auction, where the buyer is reselling rather than building. We show this as a separate, much lower band — typically 12–30% of the retail mid-point.
Wholesale-weighted tools are not wrong, they are answering the auction question. If you are a founder buying a name to build on, the retail range is the one that describes your actual situation.
Protocol, www., path and casing are stripped. The name is split into a second-level label and an extension. Anything that is not a plausible registrable domain is rejected rather than scored.
The label is matched against a dictionary of category keywords and common brandable business words to see whether it decomposes into real words. This matters because raw character count is a poor proxy for brandability: a seventeen-character string that reads as two clean words behaves like a much shorter name. When a two-word split is found, the model scores an effective length rather than the literal one.
Base values step down as the effective length grows, because supply grows with length and memorability falls. Two- and three-character labels sit in the rarest classes; anything beyond roughly fourteen characters is treated as structurally weak regardless of what it says.
Two structural bonuses apply here: a single real dictionary word (the highest brandability class) and a clean two-word construction that reads like a real brand.
.com is the benchmark at 1.0. .ai sits marginally below it, .bot lower again, and the long tail of generic extensions is discounted heavily — not as a judgement of taste but because resale liquidity outside .com and .ai is genuinely thin.
Terms with demonstrable commercial pull in the current market — AI, robotics, agentic, reasoning, inference, sovereign, fintech, biotech and regional anchors among them — apply a multiplier. Stacking is damped, so a name crammed with four buzzwords does not compound into a fantasy number.
An additional premium applies when both halves of a two-word name are category terms — an exact-match category phrase such as robotics + reasoning — because those attract strategic buyers rather than resellers.
Hyphens carry a steep discount; they are the single clearest signal of a second-choice name. Numerals carry a smaller one, because digits weaken verbal recall — you cannot say them over a phone without disambiguating.
A vowel-to-consonant ratio in a balanced band earns a modest bonus. This is a heuristic, not linguistics: it catches unsayable consonant clusters, and nothing more sophisticated than that is claimed for it.
Each extension has a floor below which a clean brandable does not realistically broker. The retail mid-point is the floored result; the published range runs from 0.8× to 2.6× that mid-point, which reflects how wide genuine end-user outcomes are.
Confidence measures how much structural evidence the model actually had — a recognised extension, matched keywords, a clean word split, a pronounceable pattern. It is capped well below 100 and never rises above 92. A high confidence score means the model understood the name, not that the price is right.
Every report queries RDAP for the real registration status, creation and expiry dates and registrar. If the name is one we are selling, you see our live asking price and a link to the listing instead of a modelled estimate.
Being explicit about this matters more than the arithmetic above.
An appraisal is an estimate, not an offer, an endorsement, or a guarantee of sale price. We do not publish an accuracy claim because the sales record is too incomplete for any appraisal tool to honestly demonstrate one.
No. An appraisal is a modelled estimate of the range a name would plausibly broker at. A market value only exists at the moment a specific buyer agrees a specific number. Two buyers with different alternatives will rationally pay very different amounts for the same name, which is why we publish a range and a confidence score rather than a single figure.
No. It is a structural model: it scores the name itself — length, word structure, extension, keyword intent, and phonetics — rather than matching it against a comparable-sales database. That is a deliberate limitation and the reason we tell every user to check NameBio and DNJournal for real disclosed comparables before agreeing a price.
Those tools weight past auction outcomes heavily, and most auction sales close at wholesale liquidation prices. Our model estimates the retail brokered range instead — what a broker would list at for an end-user buyer. Both are legitimate answers to different questions. The report shows a wholesale range alongside the retail range so you can see the gap.
We do not publish an accuracy figure, because we cannot demonstrate one. Domain sales are mostly private, so there is no representative sample against which any appraisal tool — ours included — can be honestly back-tested. Treat the output as a structured second opinion, not evidence.
You see the live asking price for that name instead of an algorithmic guess, and a link to the listing. We do not use the model to justify our own prices.