This test of domain appraisal accuracy includes our own tool, and our tool does not come out of it well. On 24 sales from one week, the SERPHeroes Domain Worth Calculator’s bands did not separate prices: the median sale in its Premium band was $32,508, in its End-user band $28,698.50 and in its Investor band $28,700. All 13 sales placed in a band with a dollar anchor sold above that anchor, at a median of 117.6 times.
Domain appraisal accuracy: the results
Score and price barely moved together. Our Spearman rank correlation between score and sale price was 0.34 across all 24 names and −0.05 across the 14 .coms, which is no relationship at all. With a small sample of high-priced sales, treat both figures as indicative, not significant.
The bands did sort the very top: clarity.com ($3,500,000), tradingcards.com ($2,000,000) and nor.com ($700,000) all scored Premium. Below them, Premium names sold for $25,000 to $50,500, and names placed one or two bands lower sold for the same money. Not one sale came in below its band.
GoDaddy Domain Appraisals, known as GoValue, could be checked for only two names. It valued 6364.com at $95,185; the name sold for $43,500, less than half. It valued clarity.com at $1,840,079; the name sold for $3,500,000, about 1.9 times that. Two results are not a hit rate, and we give none.
How we tested
The sample is the 24 sales reported for 12 to 18 October 2026 in Domain.News’s weekly Top 20, the list behind domain sales this week. 23 of the 24 prices have a second source in NameBio’s daily reports or DNJournal; jiudian.com is Domain.News only. Together they total $6,984,624.
The Worth Calculator scores six factors: extension (25 points), length (20), words (25), characters (10), registration age (10) and backlinks (10). We entered no backlink figure, so every score is out of the 90 points that could be measured. It returns a score and a band, not a price: Premium (78+), End-user (60–77), Investor (40–59) or Registration-fee (under 40). Only two bands carry a dollar anchor, both GoDaddy figures from July 2019: End-user cites an Afternic average of “over $1,500”, and Investor a GoDaddy Auctions average of $170. Premium names, the page says, are “priced by negotiation, not formula”. We called the tool’s public endpoint for each name, about three seconds apart, and all 24 returned a result.
GoDaddy’s public appraisal page states: “With this appraisal tool, you are able to evaluate 3 domains daily.” After two lookups the service returned “Rate limit exceeded” and kept doing so on retries for about eight minutes, so we stopped. Neither result came with comparable sales. Every lookup was checked in October 2026, the week after the sales, with registration dates read live from the registry.
The 24 sales, domain by domain
Band key: P = Premium; E = End-user (anchor: $1,500 average); I = Investor (anchor: $170 average). “Limit” means GoDaddy’s daily cap had been reached.
| Domain | Sale | Calculator | GoDaddy |
|---|---|---|---|
| clarity.com | $3,500,000 | 94 P | $1,840,079 |
| tradingcards.com | $2,000,000 | 82 P | Limit |
| nor.com | $700,000 | 97 P | Limit |
| wellness.net | $146,000 | 68 E | Limit |
| jiudian.com | $77,000 | 67 E | Limit |
| vyra.com | $50,500 | 83 P | Limit |
| openrouter.si | $50,000 | 52 I | Limit |
| 6364.com | $43,500 | 90 P | $95,185 |
| 7121.com | $32,508 | 90 P | Limit |
| 83.ai | $32,397 | 74 E | Limit |
| distributedcompute.com | $32,000 | 59 I | Limit |
| igamingtimes.com | $29,000 | 59 I | Limit |
| rebellion.si | $28,700 | 58 I | Limit |
| 9135.com | $27,008 | 90 P | Limit |
| 7570.com | $27,000 | 90 P | Limit |
| qda.com | $26,016 | 97 P | Limit |
| mzs.com | $25,500 | 97 P | Limit |
| pempo.com | $25,000 | 81 P | Limit |
| stocks.si | $25,000 | 71 E | Limit |
| kadence.ai | $25,000 | 58 I | Limit |
| greeted.ai | $22,495 | 74 E | Limit |
| dubai.si | $20,000 | 56 I | Limit |
| plasma.si | $20,000 | 67 E | Limit |
| southkorea.si | $20,000 | 46 I | Limit |
Why the appraisals missed
The misses follow three patterns. The first is extension. Every .si and .ai name scored End-user or Investor, because .si earns 9 of 25 points and .ai 15, yet each of the nine sold for $20,000 to $50,000. The .si prices also reflect a short-lived speculative surge after a “super intelligence” remark on 22 September 2026, which no tool anchored to 2019 averages could know about.
The second is registration age. jiudian.com and igamingtimes.com were drop-caught at DropCatch, and their registry creation dates were reset days before the sale, to 10 and 7 October 2026. The calculator scored both as brand-new registrations, 0 of 10 for age.
The third is the end-user premium. A formula scores the string, not the buyer. Domain Name Wire reports Sedo’s .si buys, such as plasma.si, as defensive end-user purchases. GoDaddy’s own engineering post makes the point: an end user “may be willing to spend orders of magnitude more money than the domain name investor. However, for a specific name, there is a low probability that this second type of buyer will exist.” The biggest miss, openrouter.si at $50,000, scored 52, placing it in the band anchored to GoDaddy Auctions’ $170 average: 294 times that figure.
GoDaddy’s model is more ambitious. Its 2019 post on deep learning for domain valuation describes a recurrent neural network with “hundreds of different features” and says GoValue is “significantly better at predicting past sale prices than both human experts and Estibot”. It also notes that venue “can often account for more of the differences in price than the names themselves”. In May 2026 Domain Name Wire reported that the tool “is currently using a very old model with outdated data”. Our two results settle nothing either way, though clarity.com’s value sat above the $1,000,000 upper limit returned in the same response.
What this test cannot show
The sample is 24 sales from one week, all over $20,000, selected because they were high. It can show tools under-valuing names that sold; it cannot show how often they over-value names that never sell. Prices are as reported. Buyers are unknown, so we cannot split end-user from investor purchases, and nor.com’s sale date is reported as both 14 and 15 October.
“Above the band” means above a 2019 venue average used as an anchor, not above a stated maximum; the calculator gives no dollar range. Scores reflect the tool as deployed in October 2026 and may change. Two GoDaddy values are anecdotes. As Domain Name Wire put it after testing 15 tools: “To truly test, you’d need to run through thousands of unreported sales, and only a few companies have the data to do that.”
What to use instead
Price a name from comparable sales: same length, extension and type, sold recently. Looking up domain sales history shows where to find them, and our domain appraisal guide covers the tools. Treat any appraisal as a floor check, a quick test that you are not selling below what a model suggests, never as a price.
The Domain Worth Calculator stays useful for what it measures: extension, length, words, characters and age, each scored and explained. It does not predict a sale price, and this test shows it should not be read as if it did. Its own page says it “does not know who wants the name, or what similar names sold for.” If you are negotiating with an owner, see what it costs to buy a domain from its owner.
Frequently asked questions
How accurate is GoDaddy’s domain appraisal?
We could check two names before its limit of three a day: 6364.com was valued at $95,185 and sold for $43,500; clarity.com was valued at $1,840,079 and sold for $3,500,000. That is too few for a hit rate.
Can domain appraisal AI predict a sale price?
Not reliably for a single name. Domain Name Wire’s view after testing 15 tools: “What matters is getting the order of magnitude right.”
Is the Domain Worth Calculator an appraisal?
No. It scores a name’s measurable traits and maps them to a band. In our test the bands did not predict price below the top few sales.
The takeaway No appraisal we tested predicted these prices. Use comparable sales to price a name and an appraisal only as a floor check. If you are buying, browse aged domains with registry age and spam scans shown.
