Thanksgiving Has Huge Search Traffic: The Domains Don’t Reflect It
Thanksgiving generates a huge amount of online activity every year. Recipes, shopping guides, travel plans, and food searches all spike at the same moment. You would expect the internet’s Thanksgiving-related domains to reflect that. You’d expect serious publishers, recipe brands, or media companies to control the space.
When you actually look at the domains attached to the holiday, you find something very different. The landscape is a mix of extremely valuable names, half-developed projects, accidental ownership, and long periods of inactivity. Very few of the best names are being used in a focused or strategic way.
Below is a look at what each major Thanksgiving-adjacent domain is doing today and what that suggests about the larger market.
Domains that are active
Only a small number of the strongest Thanksgiving names have real websites behind them.
Thanksgiving.com
The domain redirects to USA Today and functions as part of their seasonal lifestyle and food coverage. It is active, but it isn’t a standalone Thanksgiving brand. It works more as a doorway into a broader media property rather than a dedicated holiday site.
BlackFriday.com
This name has corporate backing and consistent year-round attention. It dominates the retail side of the season and is treated as an important asset rather than a novelty.
Turkey.com
This is a unique case. The site focuses on the country of Turkey rather than the Thanksgiving meal. It is a real project with real content, but the footer of the site states openly that the domain is available for purchase at a minimum price in the multi-million-dollar range. In other words, it is both active and for sale.
Domains that are available and ripe for the picking
Many of the strongest Thanksgiving-related domains with .com TLDs are for sale, which is an opportunity waiting for someone to capitalize on.
These domains have strong type-in value, strong search alignment, and wide editorial potential. They could support projects across multiple holidays, or serve as the foundation for strong brands in entirely different industries, but at the moment they remain unused.
The unusual situation with some domains
Friendsgiving.com
Friendsgiving has grown quickly as a cultural event, especially among younger adults. Search volume has climbed steadily, and social usage is widespread.
But, the domain doesn’t reflect that. Friendsgiving.com currently redirects to personal LinkedIn page. It is one of the clearest examples of a valuable cultural term being owned without any real plan for it.
PumpkinPie.com
PumpkinPie.com belongs to a startup that originally operated under the name Pumpkin Pie but now goes by Pie. The company was founded in 2020 by Andy Dunn, the founder of Bonobos, and is based in Chicago. Its mission is to help people make real-world friends by organizing or discovering small in-person events built around shared interests.
Although the domain resolves, the product still feels early. A startup database describes it as “the ultimate friendship game,” where users answer questions and compare results with friends, while coverage from Inc.com frames it as an events platform. The app is currently live only in a few markets: Austin, Chicago, Columbus, and the Bay Area. According to public reporting, Pie has raised a Series A round, bringing total funding to around 24 million dollars at a valuation in the 40–50 million dollar range.
In short, PumpkinPie.com is a premium holiday-themed domain being used for a young social-connection startup that is still defining its identity and is active only in a handful of cities.
What this means for opportunity
Even though many of the best domains are taken, most are underused. They are not strong brands, not active publishing projects, and not important parts of the internet’s holiday traffic system. The Thanksgiving domain space looks full at first glance but feels mostly unoccupied once you inspect it.
Someone who wanted to build a dedicated Thanksgiving or holiday cooking brand would not face much competition. Nearly all the strongest names exist in a state of waiting. They attract curiosity and occasional visitors but not real direction.
It is unusual to see a major American holiday with such little domain development. The names are there, but the work behind them is not. Anyone who chose to build in this space today would be one of the first to treat it as a real digital category, not just a list of parked assets.
