How DomainIQ calculates a valuation
No trade secrets, no black box. Every factor below is shown on every valuation report, along with the exact score it received.
1. Length & structure
Shorter root labels score higher, but not by a smooth exponential — the price mapping (step 6 below) is banded so that only truly exceptional short strings reach real premium territory, matching how the aftermarket actually behaves rather than a formula that explodes upward in the middle of the range.
2. Word composition
We segment the domain against a 63,000-word English dictionary to detect whether it's a single real word, a clean two-word compound, or a coined/brandable string, and score clarity accordingly.
3. Brandability
Pronounceability signals — vowel/consonant balance, syllable count, repeated characters, digits and hyphens — feed a memorability score independent of dictionary matching.
4. Extension (TLD) authority
Each extension carries a market-authority score and a price multiplier relative to the equivalent .com, based on observed aftermarket demand (.com, .io and .ai command large premiums; many new gTLDs carry very little).
5. Keyword commercial demand
The domain is checked against a curated table of high buyer-intent keywords (insurance, loans, AI, casino, crypto, and more), each with a demand multiplier reflecting typical end-buyer budgets in that category.
6. Baseline price curve
Length, word composition and brandability combine into a single 0-100 "linguistic score," which maps to a baseline dollar value via a set of authored price-band control points (log-interpolated between them), not a single runaway exponential. That baseline is then multiplied by the extension's price multiplier and any matched keyword's demand multiplier.
7. Comparable sales, price-gated
We match the domain against a dataset of 100+ reference sales by extension, category and length — but a comp only gets real weight if its price is also in the same order of magnitude as this domain's own independent baseline estimate. Without that gate, a handful of famous multi-million-dollar headline sales (which is disproportionately what's publicly documented) would drag an ordinary domain's price toward them just because both happen to be, say, a 9-character .com. If the exact domain you searched has a recorded sale, that figure is used directly instead of the formula.
8. Phonetic clarity (the "radio test")
Separately from pronounceability, we check how easily someone could spell the domain correctly after only hearing it read aloud — ambiguous letter clusters, mixed letters-and-digits, letters that visually misread as other letters, and a small non-exhaustive list of known problem meanings in other major languages.
9. Channel pricing
The blended estimate is split into three price points instead of one: a wholesale price (quick sale to another domain investor), an inbound buy-it-now price (what a passive end-user pays on a landing page — this is the headline number), and an outbound target (the ceiling when proactively pitching a funded or established business), scaled up by how "hot" the domain's vertical currently is for well-capitalized buyers.
10. Trademark & legal friction
If you configure a free USPTO API key, every report runs a live trademark search. Without one, a small built-in list of globally famous marks is checked instead, and the report clearly labels which kind of check actually ran — it never claims a domain is "clear" without a real check behind that claim.
+ Registration age (when available)
A public RDAP lookup checks how long the domain has been registered. Older domains get a modest bonus, reflecting the SEO/trust value of an established registration. If the lookup fails or times out, this factor is simply omitted rather than guessed.
What's in the comps dataset
Two kinds of rows, and every valuation report tells you which kind matched:
- Reported industry press sales — real domain-name transactions covered by domain-industry trade press or mainstream business reporting. These skew toward famous, high-dollar deals, since that's overwhelmingly what gets public coverage.
- Illustrative aftermarket-tier estimates — synthetic reference points spanning the price tiers that dominate the real aftermarket (hundreds to low tens-of-thousands of dollars) and extensions beyond .com, grounded in generally-known price-band ratios per extension and quality tier rather than any single transaction. These exist to give ordinary, non-headline domains something realistic to be compared against.
About the vertical & buyer-targeting data
The "outbound fit" score and vertical capital-heat tag (e.g. "AI/ML — high heat") are a hand-curated proxy for which industries currently draw well-funded buyers, reasoned from generally-known investment trends — not a live feed from Crunchbase, PitchBook, or any funding database. The go-to-market section describes the type of buyer and pitch angle to target; it never invents specific real company names, since this app has no company database to back that up truthfully.
How this compares to paid appraisal tools
Commercial tools like GoDaddy's appraisal, Estibot, or HumbleWorth draw on internal marketplace data covering hundreds of thousands of real listings and sales, plus signals this tool doesn't have access to — search volume/CPC data, backlink and traffic metrics, live marketplace asking prices. Some train a machine-learning model on that data rather than using authored rules.
DomainIQ's methodology follows the same general shape (length + extension + keyword demand + comparable sales) but runs entirely on a small, transparent, hand-curated dataset with no paid data feed behind it. Expect it to track well for domains that closely resemble something in that dataset, and to be directionally reasonable — not precisely matched to any specific paid tool — everywhere else. Treat every number here as a well-reasoned estimate to anchor your own research, not a guaranteed sale price or a substitute for a professional appraisal on a high-value domain.