July 03, 2026
20 min read
We logged 1,348,706 requests across two production web properties for 174 days and classified every user-agent. AI crawlers now generate 7.2% of all observed traffic — more than Googlebot, Bingbot, DuckDuckBot, Baiduspider, and PetalBot combined. OpenAI alone accounts for 38% of the AI crawl, 69% of AI requests still feed training pipelines, and a robots.txt honeypot shows 99% of AI-crawler violations trace to a single bot. For publishers, infrastructure teams, and anyone deciding what to do about the new tenants of the crawl economy.
July 02, 2026
18 min read
We followed every one of the 181.1 million domains that resolved in April 2023 across 26 DNS snapshots to June 2026, and did the same for a 246.8-million-domain 2025 cohort. The resolving web loses 13-15% of itself every year — a half-life of roughly five years — but the deaths are wildly unequal: Freenom's five TLDs went 99% extinct in the largest die-off ever recorded in the DNS, the cheap-promo gTLDs lose up to 95% of their web in three years, and Germany's .de keeps 84% alive. For registrars, investors, security teams, and anyone who links to anything.
June 27, 2026
23 min read
The first edition of the Internet Concentration Index: a synthesis of four full-corpus, typed-DNS censuses of the same ~3-billion-name dataset, measuring who controls the Internet's core layers one domain at a time. DNS, email, cloud hosting and the CDN/proxy edge each have a different owner — GoDaddy, Google, Amazon and Cloudflare — no single company controls all four, the enterprise giant everyone names (Microsoft) is nearly invisible by domain count, and 92.5% of delegated domains sit on a single point of failure. For policymakers, security teams, and anyone who has watched one outage take down half the web.
June 26, 2026
21 min read
We replayed 26 monthly snapshots of where the world's domains resolve — 38 months of A-record and geoIP data, Apr 2023 to Jun 2026 — counted one domain one vote across tens of millions of apexes per month. The expected story was de-Americanization and cloud consolidation. The data tells a stranger one: the geographic map barely moved. The United States hosted 45.9% of resolving domains in 2023 and 45.2% in 2026. The only line that climbed is the anycast bucket that hides where a domain truly lives, and the only provider that genuinely surged is Amazon, which tripled its footprint while its share of cloud spending fell. This is the first longitudinal post in the series.
June 25, 2026
20 min read
We crossed two full-corpus DNS censuses of the same May 2026 crawl — the MX layer that names who runs each domain's mail, and the SPF/DMARC/MTA-STS/BIMI layer that says whether that mail is authenticated. Across 149.8 million mail-capable apex domains, email-authentication posture turns out to be inherited from the provider, not chosen by the owner: security gateways and Microsoft 365 run the credible anti-spoofing stack on 17–19% of their domains, while the four largest registrar-bundled hosts — IONOS, Hostinger, Namecheap, OVH — run it on under 1.2%, and the largest email category on the Internet stops spoofing on just 3.5% of its 46.7 million domains. The 9% that actually resist spoofing are not spread across the Internet; they cluster behind a handful of operators.
June 24, 2026
15 min read
A follow-up to our .ai gold-rush analysis. We measured what a million .ai domains actually do — using our June 2026 typed-DNS crawl of 1,013,951 registrable roots across A, MX, NS, and TXT records. 94.3% resolve, but only 48.5% show any real-use signal and 20.4% carry a SaaS verification token; meanwhile ~9% sit on for-sale nameservers, startup adoption keeps climbing (YC cohorts ~23%→32%), and .ai is measurably one of the cleanest fast-growing TLDs for abuse.
June 23, 2026
18 min read
We pointed an NS-typed crawl at 301 million registry domains to ask who actually answers the first question of every web request. 277.6 million are delegated, and the answer is concentrated: registrar-bundled DNS runs nearly half the delegated web, GoDaddy leads at 18.9% as the default nobody chose, and Cloudflare follows at 13.9% as the operator everybody migrates to — more than every hyperscaler cloud combined. Beneath the leaderboard sits a quieter finding: 92.5% of delegated domains depend on a single DNS organization with no independent backup. Built from 151 million-plus apex NS records.
June 22, 2026
20 min read
India has 954 million internet users and the world's second-highest IPv6 capability — 78% of its users can reach the modern Internet, and Reliance Jio's all-IP network runs at ~95%. We then crawled its national namespace: 20.2 million .in hostnames, 10.2 million resolving across forward-DNS, MX, AAAA, NS, DMARC and IP-to-ASN data. The content layer tells the opposite story. Only 20% of .in domains are hosted on Indian soil — the United States alone hosts twice as much; only 20% offer IPv6 despite the world-class access network; Amazon AWS is the single largest operator of the Indian web. India consumes the Internet on world-class rails and publishes it on borrowed ground.
June 21, 2026
20 min read
We pointed an MX-typed crawl at 390 million registered domains to ask who actually handles the Internet's email. Only 38.7% can receive mail at all. Among those that can, Google Workspace leads Microsoft 365 by 1.4 to 1 (13.2% vs 9.4%) — the inverse of the enterprise market — yet both are dwarfed by registrar- and host-bundled email, which serves nearly a third of all mail-capable domains directly and most of the long tail besides. The result is a geographic map: Google owns the Americas and the developer world, Microsoft owns Northern Europe and the Commonwealth, and domestic hosts own their home ccTLDs. Built from 151 million apex MX records.
June 20, 2026
24 min read
A CNAME record is a forwarding address — it names who actually serves a hostname. We pointed a CNAME-typed crawl at 1.86 billion names and found 297 million aliases. Of the 169 million that point outward, 41% land on site builders and managed hosts, 20% on domain-parking lots, and only 6% on CDNs — because Cloudflare, which fronts a quarter of the web, flattens its CNAMEs into A/AAAA and barely appears. The alias map is a rental map: the web is served by a short list of platforms, and the record type you query decides which half you can see.