A domain can now say it is for sale, through DNS records

Came across this recently the _for-sale DNS record spec.

The basic idea is pretty simple - if you’re willing to sell a domain, you can publish that information in DNS instead of replacing the site with one of those “this domain is for sale” pages.

So you could have something like:


You can also publish things like an asking price or a short message.

I like this mainly because it separates the two things. The domain can keep running normally, while still making it clear to machines (and people) that it’s available.

Seems like a small thing, but it could be useful for domain marketplaces, brokers, crawlers, etc. Instead of trying to guess whether a domain is for sale, there’s an actual DNS signal saying it is.

Source is here https://specification.website/spec/foundations/for-sale-dns/

yeah @Wraithed is probably right about the big brokers taking forever to adopt this, they want you on their landers anyway. but honestly from a scraping perspective this could be pretty huge if it catches on. doing bulk dns queries is way faster and cheaper than crawling html and dealing with cloudflare blocks just to see if a domain is for sale. only downside i see is footprints... if you put the same contact link in the txt record for fifty domains you are basically hand delivering your network to competitors. still cool though, might set up a quick script to scan some lists and see if anyone is actually using it yet.

Neat idea. If this becomes common, the best version would probably be a simple on/off option in the domain or DNS panel.