This week in domain intelligence:
- A disease scare abroad set off a registration burst spread across many registrars, and it faded within days as the official account held.
- The largest emerging keyword came from suspected batch registrations over two days, through two registrars and one DNS provider.
- A rocket company’s rename sent registrants after the new abbreviation, and the matching .com changed hands.
- A marketplace’s two posts of accumulated .ai sales filled most of the sales table, alongside a one-word .org sold at another venue.
- The new top-level domain application list was published, opening a two-week window for applicants to switch strings.
Domain Registration Intelligence
Weekly Registration Overview
New domain registrations from October 5 to 11, 2026, compared with September 28 to October 4, on data available October 13. Source: DomainKits NRDS.
| TLD | Oct 5-11 total | Daily avg | Sep 28-Oct 4 total | Daily avg | Daily avg change |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| .com | 1,030,097 | 147,157 | 1,014,165 | 144,881 | +2,276 |
| .org | 59,523 | 8,503 | 58,665 | 8,381 | +122 |
| .net | 52,778 | 7,540 | 53,092 | 7,585 | -45 |
| .app | 36,877 | 5,268 | 33,399 | 4,771 | +497 |
| .dev | 11,199 | 1,600 | 10,522 | 1,503 | +97 |
| .xyz | 468,710 | 66,959 | 228,961 | 32,709 | +34,250 |
The .xyz jump traces to one registrar: names registered through Onamae.com rose from 187,930 to 424,300 week over week, and 421,998 of those Onamae names delegate DNS to Afternic’s nameservers.
Hot Keywords
September 14 to October 11, 2026. Pure-letter .com registrations only. Of the twenty highest-volume keywords, the two largest weekly gainers and the three largest decliners by percentage. Source: DomainKits Trends.
| Keyword | Sep 14-20 | Sep 21-27 | Sep 28-Oct 4 | Oct 5-11 | W-o-W |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| tech | 4,489 | 4,363 | 4,403 | 4,852 | +10.2% |
| try | 2,394 | 2,642 | 2,835 | 3,124 | +10.2% |
| pro | 3,894 | 3,975 | 4,313 | 4,200 | -2.6% |
| solutions | 3,528 | 3,610 | 3,507 | 3,488 | -0.5% |
| llc | 4,430 | 4,564 | 4,518 | 4,501 | -0.4% |
Emerging .com Keywords
The five largest emerging keywords this week are coverage, slot, togel, judi and gacor. Emerging means at least 100 registrations in the report week and at least twice the mean of the prior three weeks; a keyword that shares most of its names with a higher one is folded into it. Pure-letter .com registrations only, deduplicated by domain. Source: DomainKits NRDS.
| Keyword | Prior 3-week avg | Report week | vs. avg | Peak day share |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| coverage | 125 | 2,771 | +2,117% | 80% |
| slot | 906 | 1,964 | +117% | 16% |
| togel | 298 | 809 | +172% | 18% |
| judi | 238 | 729 | +207% | 25% |
| gacor | 234 | 645 | +175% | 18% |
coverage comes from suspected batch registrations: 2,685 of the week’s names were registered on October 9 and 10 through OpusDNS GmbH and Spaceship, built from coverage or coveragex with a prefix word, a suffix, or both (abundancecoveragex, coveragexbastion, smartcoverageapp, runcoveragexly), and delegated to 58 Cloudflare nameserver pairs, 55 of them holding 42 to 50 names each and one shared by both registrar sets. The same days, the uniform block sizes and the shared pair appear to trace to a coordinated registration campaign; public nameservers carry many unrelated parties, so they do not identify a registrant.
slot, togel, judi and gacor are Indonesian gambling vocabulary registered through many registrars, with one Cloudflare nameserver pair alone holding 324 slot, 168 gacor and 163 judi names. Their gains against the three-week mean mostly date from the week of September 28, when slot (in last issue’s table), judi and gacor first rose; week over week they added 205, 53 and 95 names, and togel added 346.
Last week’s two batches fell back sharply: listingsong added 33 names on October 5 and none on the following six days, and no further truck-parking names came from the Dominet set.
The week’s event keyword did not reach the table: plague reached 82 pure-letter .com names against the threshold of 100, and 200 across the generic extensions in the dataset. A laboratory worker at the Irkutsk anti-plague institute died on October 2 of pneumonia of unknown cause; media reports raised plague, and Russian authorities said tests found no plague (AP, October 5; AFP, October 6). Across those extensions, names containing plague went from 9 on October 4 to 67 on October 5 and 74 on October 6, then fell to single digits from October 8.
The names split into places (irkutskplague, siberiaplague), trackers (plaguetracker in several extensions, plaguemap), remedies and tests (plaguemedicine, plaguetesting, plaguekit) and meme-coin style names (plaguecoin, plaguepepe). Registrars are spread, with none above 32 names; the only sizable group on one Cloudflare pair is 26 names, mostly meme-style (plaguewojak, plaguesuperinu), through NameSilo, and a further 11 came through GoDaddy on marketplace nameservers, nine of them remedy and test names and two statistics and news names (plaguestats, plagueupdate).
superintelligence, last issue’s lead, fell to 684 names from 1,445 week over week. The new turn is a rename: Elon Musk said on October 4 that SpaceXAI would become SpaceXSI (Reuters via The Star), names containing spacexsi rose from 23 to 36, spread across registrars with no large batch visible, and the matching .com appears under Selected Sales.
Registration data reflects observed patterns in newly registered domain names and does not constitute investment advice. Individual registrant intent cannot be confirmed from registration data alone.
Domain Trading Intelligence
Selected Sales
The five highest-priced sales reported for October 5 to 11 whose venue is confirmed by the platform or the seller. Dates are the dates the sales were reported; for names from a marketplace’s batch post, that is the date of the post. Where two sales tie for the fifth row, the first alphabetically is shown and the other is named below.
| Domain | Price | Platform | Reported date |
|---|---|---|---|
| act.ai | $375,000 | Spaceship | Oct 5 |
| liquid.org | $300,000 | Atom | Oct 8 |
| spacexsi.com | $174,000 | Spaceship | Oct 7 |
| rooms.ai | $157,000 | Spaceship | Oct 10 |
| critical.ai | $150,000 | Spaceship | Oct 5 |
Three rows come from two posts by Spaceship’s founder listing recent .ai sales without individual dates: thirteen names on October 5, totaling $1,399,500, and six on October 10, totaling $549,000. pad.ai, at $150,000 in the first post, ties with critical.ai for the fifth row.
spacexsi.com, listed at $174,888, sold three days after the rename announcement, and its registry record moved to MarkMonitor on October 7; the buyer has not been disclosed by a primary source. Outside the five, decided.com completed a lease-to-own agreement at Afternic for $100,000 on October 5, and a seller’s $50,000 .si sale at Spaceship on October 10 was the highest .si price reported in the week.
Industry News
ICANN publishes the 2026 round applications. On October 7, ICANN released the applied-for strings and applicant names for the new gTLD round, 1,615 applications as of that day. Applicants who listed a replacement string may switch to it from October 8 to October 21; String Confirmation Day on November 17 opens the community input and objection period. ICANN announcement
Premium Domain Intelligence
Selected .com expirations and drop-catches detected from October 5 to 11 by DomainKits Changes Monitor.
Notable Expirations
The five oldest by original creation among the week’s five- to ten-letter expirations still on expiry-hold nameservers at a registry check on October 13. The registry advances a .com expiration date by a year automatically, so that date alone does not mean a renewal.
| Domain | Length | Original creation year | Registrar | Detected |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| legwear.com | 7L | 1995 | GoDaddy | Oct 10 |
| homeair.com | 7L | 1997 | Network Solutions | Oct 7 |
| moveupdate.com | 10L | 1997 | Network Solutions | Oct 8 |
| kolita.com | 6L | 1997 | Network Solutions | Oct 10 |
| grassseed.com | 9L | 1998 | Network Solutions | Oct 7 |
Notable Drop-Catches
The five oldest names by original creation that were re-registered during the week.
| Domain | Original creation year | Caught by | Date |
|---|---|---|---|
| boltshop.com | 1998 | DropCatch | Oct 9 |
| softspeed.com | 1998 | DropCatch | Oct 7 |
| bigsearch.com | 1998 | DropCatch | Oct 5 |
| petstyle.com | 1999 | DropCatch | Oct 9 |
| bluethink.com | 1999 | DropCatch | Oct 10 |
Names Followed From Earlier Issues
- nosesa.com. In pending delete since October 3; deleted and not re-registered at the October 13 check; closed.
- liststar.com. Nameservers changed from the expiry-hold set to ispnet.net on October 7 and the status is active; off the list.
Weekly Insight
The plague names appeared on the day the story went international and before any case was confirmed, so a scare produces registrations faster than facts. For abuse teams the week’s list is a set of names to check, not a ranking. Search the week’s plague names in DomainKits NRDS.
Method Notes
- Datasets. The overview uses the registration records for both weeks because the daily trend series lacked October 9 and 10 for several extensions, so the prior-week column differs from last issue’s print (.com 1,019,629, .org 58,731, .net 53,408, .app 33,200, .dev 10,380, .xyz 228,998).
- Keyword counts. Word-based, deduplicated by domain, pure-letter .com only.
- Sales. Venue confirmed by the marketplaces’ own posts: Spaceship’s founder for the three .ai names and for spacexsi.com, Atom for liquid.org. The Sedo weekly list covering the week had not been published at press time.
- Monitoring dates. Expirations and drop-catches were detected October 5 to 11.
Data Sources: Sales: collected public reports; the selected table identifies the platform named in each report. Registration and trend data: DomainKits. Domain changes: DomainKits Changes. For reference only, not investment advice.
Published by: ABTdomain