What 2025 Snagged Transactions Reveal About The Market

Every year, the domain industry produces no shortage of opinions. What’s dead, and what’s “the new .com.” Add AI to the mix and the noise gets louder, faster. This report isn’t built on opinions alone.

Everything that follows is grounded in completed domain transactions at Snagged in 2025, paired with real-world pattern recognition from me (Rob Schutz) and my partner, Brian Jarcho, who spent the year negotiating with founders, investors, and sellers on deals that actually closed.

In total, we completed 467 domain transactions in 2025, representing roughly $24 million in total volume, with prices ranging from $59 at the low end to $2.75 million at the high end.

The domain market is not a single, uniform ecosystem. It’s several distinct markets layered on top of one another, each responding differently to company stage, conviction, and risk tolerance. It’s also part of what makes this industry interesting and unpredictable and what makes each deal it’s own adventure.

Understanding the layers is the key to understanding where naming, and domain names, are headed in 2026. So let’s dive in, shall we?

The Market is Wildly Uneven

It’s tempting to summarize a market with a single number, but in domains, that’s often where confusion starts.

In 2025, the average domain sale at Snagged was approximately $51,400. That number is technically accurate but practically misleading, in much the same way the “average net worth” in a room that includes Jeff Bezos tells you very little about anyone else present.

Most domain transactions cluster in a rational zone. Tens of thousands of dollars to mid five-figures. So meaningful numbers but nothing breaking the bank. This is where early-stage companies, scrappy rebrands, and first time upgrades tend to land.

At the same time, a much smaller number of transactions sit at the other end of the curve. These are six-figure and seven-figure deals that are more like big marketing campaigns or infrastructure expenses than simply domain purchases. They don’t happen every day (for us, at least!), but when they do, they heavily influence the distribution.

Founders Got Better at Timing Domains

One of the narratives in tech is that domains are becoming less important (AI for everyone, do domains really matter for brands, etc). What we saw in 2025 suggests something a lot more nuanced.

Founders have become more deliberate about when a premium domain is worth paying for.

Teams are increasingly domain-aware earlier in the company lifecycle, but that awareness now comes with some restraint. Instead of overspending at the idea stage, many founders choose clean, credible domains that support launch velocity, then revisit upgrades once traction, funding, or inbound interest changes the equation. A “good enough” approach to domains names until there’s more traction and product-market fit.

We spent much of 2025 embedded in naming processes, rebrands and helping name companies ourselves alongside founders and branding agencies. It’s an immensely gratifying process seeing a name come to life. We helped teams pressure-test “is this domain name gettable” before brand names harden into emotional commitments. There’s nothing worse than having a founder/team fall in love with a name (ie: Atlas), only to tell them the best they can do for domains is TryAtlas.io. That kind of domain-forward thinking was rare a decade ago. Today, it’s becoming much more standard practice.

The wide range of prices we saw in 2025 really shows founders buying domains at different stages of their business and moments of conviction., with a clearer understanding of tradeoffs than in prior cycles.

New TLDs Gained Traction

Every few years, someone announces that .com is finally obsolete. And every few years, .com quietly disproves the thesis by gobbling up most of the market’s dollars.

In 2025, .com accounted for the majority of our transactions and the overwhelming majority of total dollar volume. Every seven-figure transaction was a .com. Most six-figure transactions were as well.

What changed is not the relevance of .com, but the legitimacy of .ai.

.ai crossed an important threshold in 2025. It stopped being something founders felt the need to explain. It began showing up in mainstream advertising, on billboards, in airports, and TV commercials. That visibility matters. It signals that building on .ai is acceptable and mainstream. And given acquiring a one-word .ai name is much easier (and less expensive) than a .com, many AI-focused companies opted to move in that direction.

The hierarchy is clearer now. Many companies that are building AI-specific tools and services start on .ai. Some upgrade to .com once the business has earned the right spend that type of money. Others haven’t yet and might never upgrade. The market prices each of those paths accordingly.

Not All Words Are Equal

One of the clearest lessons from 2025 is that context now plays a much larger role in valuation, particularly outside of .com.

In .com, great words tend to be great words regardless of category. Pasta.com and Cloud.com can both command enormous value even though they live in entirely different worlds.

In .ai, that logic doesn’t seem to be as firm. Words that map directly to artificial intelligence, data, automation, technology or intelligence consistently command higher prices than unrelated dictionary words. A one-word .ai can still be inexpensive if it lacks relevance, while a category-aligned term can reach well into six figures. Apparently that’s why I won the auction for poutine.ai and haven’t had any offers. 😀

I often describes this difference in terms of gravity. In .ai, value pulls toward relevance. In .com, value pulls toward memorability and breadth. While there are certainly exceptions, we see this trend playing out in the names we’re asking to run down.

Short Names Are the Default

Another pattern that emerged clearly in 2025 is that short names are no longer a differentiator. They are simply the baseline.

Nearly 70% of domains acquired or sold were eight characters or fewer, a figure that reflects practical behavior rather than stylistic preference. Short names reduce friction across nearly every surface area of a business, from spoken referrals and outbound email to voice interfaces and paid media. Shorter names just feel more credible, too. Like a real, grown-up company.

Structure matters just as much. Single-word names dominate the upper end of the market, not because they are fashionable, but because they are efficient. They are easier to remember, harder to misinterpret, and simpler to build around over time.

At the same time, we continue to see a steady decline in forced misspellings. Founders have experienced the downstream cost of explaining how to spell their company name + email address in every conversation. As tolerance for alternative TLDs has increased, the need for awkward workarounds has faded, although there are of course exceptions.

Where This Goes in 2026

The future of domains is about signaling trust, gaining credibility, and driving traction for brands.

In trust-heavy contexts, consumer brands, outbound-led businesses, and companies investing meaningfully in awareness, premium domains will continue to act as accelerants. They signal legitimacy in the same way a major advertising spend does, even when the ROI is difficult to model precisely. Realistically, you just have a much better chance of getting an email response from rob@cars.com than rob@carsforsaledirect.com. And that legitimacy and trust compounds over time.

In other contexts, particularly products distributed through AI interfaces or closed ecosystems, domains may play a smaller role. The market already reflects that distinction in pricing and demand.

What is unlikely to change is scarcity at the top. Exceptional names are not becoming more available. They are becoming more concentrated among companies that have earned the right to own them. And the control of available ultra premium domain names that aren’t actively in use is consolidating around a handful of very active, very savvy domain investors who’ve seen these assets appreciate at an insane clip over the last decade+.

Takeaways for Founders

1. Domains don’t create product-market fit, but they do accelerate something that’s working.
2. A premium domain won’t fix a weak product. But once momentum exists, the right domain reduces friction across trust, recall, outbound, partnerships, and brand extension. Think of domains less as a launch lever and more as a multiplier that activates only after the business is real.
3. Early-stage domain decisions are about velocity, not perfection.
4. The goal isn’t to “win” naming your startup early on by securing a super expensive domain. But, having a clean and credible domain (with a second choice TLD or a prefix/suffix that makes sense) buys you speed and legitimacy without overcommitting capital.
5. Upgrading a domain is a timing problem, not a taste problem.
6. The strongest teams treat domain upgrades as earned decisions tied to traction, not aesthetics or aspiration. As a business de-risks through traction, the math changes. What once felt expensive can become rational because the domain now supports a much larger surface area of value. And given these premium names are true assets that should appreciate over time, it feels less like a pure expense and more like something with upside.
7. Domains are one of the few digital assets you can fully own.
8. Unlike paid channels or platforms or even organic handles, a domain doesn’t reset with algorithm changes or require ongoing rent. Domain value compounds over time, and domains are scarce, 1 of 1 assets. There may be derivative TLDs of strong domain names, but there will only ever be one Name.com, Name.ai, Name.TLDofChoice. Over time, controlling the right digital real estate quietly strengthens everything built on top of it.
9. The real cost is often delay, not price.
10. Exceptional domains don’t become more available with time. Waiting to acquire a premium domain can feel prudent, but it often narrows the option set or raises the eventual cost, financially or strategically. So it’s all about tradeoffs, cash flow, runway and where you are in your businesses’ lifecycle. The most disciplined teams balance patience with awareness so decisions are intentional, not reactive.

Where Snagged Fits In

Domain strategy rarely breaks down because founders don’t care. It breaks down because in the domain world, asset value and availability is “complicated”. Information about domain names is often asymmetric and it’s challenging to track and source domain names, understand fair value for them, and navigate negotiations between buyers and sellers. Knowing when to move decisively takes real work. For most teams, it’s important, but never the most urgent thing on the list, until suddenly it is.

Snagged helps companies think clearly about domain strategy, identify and secure the right assets at the right moment, and handle the complexity that comes with acquiring names that actually matter. Sometimes that means starting with something clean and credible. Other times it means upgrading with confidence once the business has earned the spend.

Either way, domains shouldn’t be a recurring distraction or a lingering regret. They should be thought of as brand assets that are scarce and valuable, and which can be used as digital infrastructure to build meaningful businesses.

If you have a domain you’ve been thinking about but haven’t known where to start, pop us a note.

‍