Expired domain metrics explained

Every listing in the directory carries the same set of metrics, and every interface — the website, the REST API and the MCP server — publishes them the same way. This page explains what each one measures, the exact values it can take, and where it stops being reliable.

For the vocabulary around the metrics — tiers, reveals, holds — see Concepts. For turning them into a decision, see Evaluate a domain.

What gets a domain into the directory

A metric only means something next to the question of what was screened out first. Every candidate is checked before it is listed, and a candidate is dropped outright when it has:

• Spam history — a high spam score, or an archived snapshot flagged as spam.
• Parked-only history — every archived snapshot is a parking page.
• Trademark risk — the name contains a major brand.
• No measurable signal — no link or authority evidence at all.

These are hard exclusions, so you will not see a listing that fails them. It is also why the bottom of every scale means modest history, not bad history. The full screening process is described in How Revised verifies domain quality.

The metrics at a glance

Field	Measures	Published as	Can be null
revised_score	Overall grade, 0–100	A range, { "low": 65, "high": 75 }	No
referring_domains	Distinct domains linking in	Band: <10 … 250+	No
backlinks	Total links	Band: <100 … 100K+	Yes
domain_authority	Moz Domain Authority	Band of ten: 0-9 … 60+	Yes
linked_by	Recognisable sites among the linkers	Array of names	Empty array
agent_citability	Links from sources AI assistants cite	{ "score": 0–100, "sources": [...] }	Yes
spam	Link-profile risk	low or moderate	No
snapshots	Archived copies of the old site	<10, then 10+, 20+ …	No
age_years	Age in whole years	Integer	Yes
category	What the site was about	One of 20 codes	Yes
estimated_value_cents	Valuation, low bound	Integer, in cents	No

When a field is null, the row’s metrics_missing array names it. A null is absent data, never a zero — see Missing is not zero.

Revised Score

A 0–100 grade that lets you compare two listings without weighing five separate metrics against each other. It is a percentile blend of link-graph centrality, referring domains and site history, computed across the whole directory, so a 70 means the same thing on every listing.

It is published as a range centred on the exact score — { "low": 65, "high": 75 } on the REST API, "65-75" on an MCP summary row. The exact score is not part of any interface. rsMin and rsMax filter on the range.

The website grades the score into five bands:

Grade	Score
Elite	80 and above
Strong	65–79
Good	50–64
Fair	30–49
Emerging	Under 30

There is no red band, because a domain that would grade badly is excluded before it is listed. More in What is Revised Score?

Referring domains

How many distinct domains link to the name. It is the most durable signal on the row: a thousand links from one site is one relationship, and a count of distinct sites is much harder to manufacture than a raw link count.

Published value	Filter id (rd)
<10	lt10
10-50	10-50
50-100	50-100
100-250	100-250
250+	250plus

The filter takes the ids in the right-hand column, not the values — see Filters. Background: Referring domains vs backlinks.

Backlinks

Total links, from every linking page. Banded on a roughly logarithmic ladder, because link counts span five orders of magnitude: <100, 100-500, 500-1K, 1K-5K, 5K-25K, 25K-100K, 100K+.

Read it against referring_domains. A large backlink band over a small referring-domain band usually means one site linking many times — a sitewide footer or blogroll — rather than broad support.

Domain Authority

Moz’s Domain Authority, a third-party 0–100 score that predicts how well a site competes in search from its link profile. Published in bands of ten — 0-9, 10-19 … 50-59 — with everything from 60 up reported as 60+.

Expect it to be low on expired domains. It is computed from the current link graph and moves slowly, so a name can carry real referring domains and still sit in 0-9. It is null where Moz has no score for the domain, which is not the same as a score of zero. Background: What is Domain Authority?

Linked by

linked_by names the recognisable sites among a domain’s linkers — Wikipedia, Hacker News, GitHub, universities, government bodies, standards organisations and news outlets. It is drawn from a catalogue of 297 named sources (as of 23 September 2026), including 45 universities and 20 government and intergovernmental bodies.

It is usually the most informative field on the row. A small referring-domain count with Wikipedia or a university in linked_by often says more than hundreds of anonymous links. Filter on it with source, or see Find expired domains by linking site.

Agent Citability

A 0–100 score for how often a domain is linked from the sources that AI assistants cite when they answer questions. It is a different question from classic link authority, and a domain can rate well on one and poorly on the other.

agent_citability carries the score and, where known, the cited sources. It is null when the domain has no row in the current index. The methodology is published in full. Background: AI citability and expired domains.

Spam band

low or moderate. Every candidate is scored for spam risk before listing and anything in the high band is dropped, so spam never reads high.

moderate is worth a closer look rather than an automatic no. low filters the obvious cases, not all of them — read the archive before you act either way. Background: Check a domain for penalties before you register it.

Snapshots

How many times the old site was captured by the public web archive. A registration date proves someone paid for a name; a snapshot record is evidence that a site actually existed.

Published as <10, then the count rounded down to the nearest ten with a +: 40+ means at least 40. Thin archive coverage is not disqualifying, but it is less evidence, and the Revised Score reflects that.

Age

age_years is the domain’s age in whole years, where Revised can establish it. It is one of the fields most often null, which makes ageMin the filter most likely to cut a result harder than you meant — see Filters.

Category

What the site was about, as one of 20 Revised codes. It is only assigned where the archive makes the answer clear, so roughly two thirds of listings carry none. The codes and counts are in Filter the directory.

Estimated value

estimated_value_cents is the low bound of Revised’s valuation, in cents, falling back to a reference figure on rows the model has not valued. It is the figure the priceRange filter buckets. Nothing in the directory is sold by Revised, so read it as a signal about the name, not a price.

Why ranges instead of exact numbers

Two reasons. Exact figures across thousands of listings would let anyone reconstruct the dataset and identify masked names without revealing anything. And the underlying link data shifts week to week: a domain measured at 137 referring domains today might measure 119 next week with nothing about it having changed, so a precise number would claim a confidence the data does not have.

Bands are computed the same way at every tier, so any two listings are comparable. To sort, flatten them to a midpoint and keep the band for display — Evaluate a domain has a parser.